On her 15th birthday Nelly Arcan vowed that she would kill herself on her 30th. The day before that anniversary arrived, she had finished her second book. Although in another fraught state, she resisted the fatal temptation, and lived to publish a third novel, her best yet. But at 35, the beautiful, gamine, waywardly brilliant French-Canadian writer committed suicide a month before publication of her fourth novel.

Her first novel, Putain (2001), helped to bolster the money she was making as a well-paid call-girl while studying at the University of Montreal. Her work as a whole, however, catches the spirit of that city’s jeunesse dorée at the turn of the century, congregating in cafés, laptops in hand, and struggling with the angst of youth.

Nelly Arcan was born in 1973 as Isabelle Fortier into a Catholic family in the Lac Mégantic area on the border with Maine. In Putain she played up differences between her parents and referred to herself as “moi, issue d’une aberration”.

The atmosphere in her family was made fraught by an older sister’s very young death, but, as she describes in Folle (2004), there was considerable merriment provided by the entertainingly astringent views of her grandfather, who had been born in 1902 and was of the view that mankind would less evolve than dissolve. Fruitier were conversations with an aunt whose Tarot cards always failed to reveal Isabelle’s future.

That lay not in small-town life but in studying in Montreal, to which her father drove her and deplored “la cacophonie des langues et de l’architecture”. She, however, was to thrive in this 1990s bustle, although with a certain diffidence which did not preclude a fascination with mirrors. “Actually, I’m extremely attentive,” she said. “I watch how I talk to others. I’m the sort of person at a party who keeps to herself and blends in.”

While beginning to assume a new persona as Nelly Arcan, she worked on a master’s thesis about Daniel Paul Schreber, the 19th-century German judge who, beset by mental problems, wrote Memoirs of My Nervous Illness, to which Freud drew wider attention. As for herself, she was to produce a memoir, in the form of fiction (the things she did not tell her analyst), about the various forces which drew her to augment student funds by going on the game through a highpaying agency.

With its many long sentences, flowing, more than spilling, from page to page, Putain works far better in French than its American translation. Its very first page catches a forthright, fragile being: “Même pas une putain mais une poupée d’air, une parcelle d’image cristallisée.” She had liked the idea, even the empowerment, of regarding sex as a labour much like any other, such as cooking paté; that it was only bringing out a natural strand in her — “J’étais déjà putain avant de l’être.” She certainly did not shirk details of this other life, from the fluff left on the sheets to, well — she remarks that at times it felt like the 123rd day of Sodom. Graphic as it is, the abiding tone is apocalyptic, with much searing reminiscence of her parents, musing upon her own age, and great, prescient emphasis upon picturing herself dead (“leur fille chérie suicidée”). For all that, its detail is often remarkable, such as the client with a stump of an arm, “une feuille d’automne qui résiste au passage de l’hiver”.

A contender for various distinguished prizes, Putain sold well, and any suspicion it aroused that she would be a high-maintenance girlfriend was confirmed by Folle (2004). Almost a compound of Wilde’s De Profundis and such Dylan put-downs as Positively 4th Street, it is addressed to the man — a journalist with a hankering to write a novel — who has dumped her after a relationship which had progressed, amid a world of drink and drugs, to their writing (sometimes awkwardly so) in the same café. In the novel she says to him: “Ton écriture ne m’intéressait pas, mais toi, si”. She watches Sex and the City with the sound turned down while contending with his absence, which she further tries to ease by viewing all his Woody Allen films and reading a Céline novel that he esteems. She finds that she loathes both the film director and the writer. The journalist has also left her pregnant, and her reluctant abortion — amid much about The X-Files — is chronicled with a raw tenderness that defies quotation.

Meanwhile her grandfather had died at 101, confounding his family with a last breath which appeared to call upon the Devil. By that time Arcan had become a well-known figure, writing a raunchy column in a weekly freesheet. But she could not escape morbid thoughts. With À ciel ouvert (2007) she turned a communication-hungry era to new account by adapting her Montreal life into a brisk, stylishly constructed thriller.

Now with a boyfriend eight years her junior (“he doesn’t read any books, so why should he read mine?”), Arcan looked set for a new direction in her writing. The imminent publication of Paradis clef en main, however, can only round off all too brief a career.

Arcan is survived by her parents, whom she told not to read her books.

Nelly Arcan, novelist, was born on March 5, 1973. She died on September 24, 2009, aged 36