Born in Paris into a working-class family with socialist views, her father fought in the International Brigade against Franco in the Spanish Civil War. She studied medicine, psychology, and ethnology at Sorbonne, and worked later as a model, actress, and journalist, and spent fifteen years as a press attaché to the Cannes Film Festival. It was not until 1958 that she published her first novel, Le repos su guerrier.

Ahe has been reticent about her own private life - her autobiographical book is not designed to give access to her personal secrets. In her works, however, her treatment of gender and sexual orientation is notably progressive. Rochefort seems to envisage lesbianism as an important aspect of the potential experience of womanhood rather than as a separate identity.

Her position is perhaps more in accord with contemporary notions of "queer" than with the gay liberationist ideals current in the 1970s, when she formulated her position.