Jayne Tuttle writes in My Sweet Guillotine a love letter to a maddening - and dangerous - city

Jayne Tuttle has a complicated relationship with Paris. She's lived and loved and laughed and cried there, she's honed her craft, discovered what it's like to work in a place where the arts are revered, and fallen in love, again and again, with its unstoppable, beautiful and dangerous spirit.

Dangerous being the operative word. Paris tried to kill her, and didn't even seem to care.

An Aussie in Paris, she was also, in her 20s, a budding actor, and had just graduated from the Lecoq Theatre School. She had made her way to Paris to rebuild herself after the death of her mother. And she'd fallen for the whole damn thing - the beauty and the grime, the quaint and the ugly, the glamour of it all. She'd given her heart to a heart-stoppingly beautiful man, and put her past behind her.

And then, it hadn't worked out - with the bloke, at least. And on a visit to a friend's house one afternoon, she was almost decapitated - yes, you read correctly - by an elevator in one of those classic buildings that would usually make you coo with delight.

Her face was smashed open, her back broken. Incredibly, she survived, and would eventually recover.

Her first memoir, 2019's Paris or Die, was all about those early years in Paris, and she would go on to live there for more than a decade. But the accident - this strange, freaky, almost impossible to describe accident - almost didn't make it into the first draft.

"I didn't want to talk about it. It was just embarrassing and horrible and stupid," she says. "And I thought, 'Who would actually be interested in reading about that?' And as I got older, I was kind of like, well, there is something. I want to look in that dark place."

Paris or Die both opens and closes with the accident, and she would also go on to develop a one-woman show based on the book, which had an abbreviated second run earlier this year.

And now, her second memoir, My Sweet Guillotine, documents her recovery and return to Paris, and her attempt to rationalise the accident - to fit it into a narrative.

But where on earth does such a story fit? A freak accident, a miraculous survival - Tuttle was desperate to get on with her life, to prove to herself that she could keep moving. And, perversely, to prove to Paris that her love for it hadn't waned.

Weird things happen to people all the time, but when you're an artist, it can be hard to let such things rest.

"This story in particular, it really is buried in me and I think as an artistic or creative person, I was too curious to let it rest in that place," she says.

Tuttle has always been fascinated by other people's weird stories, and the strange, inexplicable things we sometimes find ourselves doing. As a kid, she went through a brief phase of sticking up her thumb voluntarily when being photographed - something that mortified her. As an actor, she's sometimes fixated on the notion that she could, say, pull down her pants or let out a belch onstage. She would never do it, of course. But she could.

And while her accident in Paris happened on an afternoon that would otherwise have been inconsequential - a visit to a friend she didn't even know all that well - was there something leading her there, some reason she leant over the banister that way? Did she have some kind of death wish?

She doesn't think so, but can't imagine what it would be like to never have the chance to get to the bottom of such things.

And so she returns to Paris - still sensitive, still healing - and finds, to her relief, that the city is every bit as magnificent and infuriating and titillating and invigorating as she remembered.

But she is completely unable - physically incapable - of returning to the scene of the accident. Instead, she finds herself with a growing awareness of danger, or her own mortality, of a city that has a startlingly casual attitude to death. Pot plants on windowsills protrude over every footpath - charming, and so, so French. And so, so dangerous. Imagine if one landed on your head! It's not like they're bolted on.

Beautiful old buildings with shaking banisters and giant holes in the staircases. People smoking everywhere, in restaurants and enclosed spaces.

But, she realised, this is all part of the charm of Paris, and one of its most irresistible traits, and one its native residents take for granted.

"This is why it was so healing for me to go there after my mum died - there's an awareness of the proximity of death," she says. "That it feels to be a part of everyday life, awareness of the self, awareness of our limits."

But when Tuttle leaned over a banister to call out to her friend's child, who was coming up the stairs, she quite forgot about those strange, French elevators, installed after the war in 19th century buildings that were never meant to have them. In this building, the elevator was descending as she leant out - the protective barrier was barely waist-high, and it materialised in deathly silence. Her head was crushed between the banister and the lift, and she somehow managed to squeeze it out from underneath before falling down the stairs.

It's hard to explain - as she would learn in the days, months and years afterwards. Especially, as it turned out, to Parisians, who would never think of walking anywhere near the lift side of the stairs. Nor, she would discover, would they ever lean over a banister to call out playfully to someone below. This is, apparently, an Australian trait, a fact she would need to defend once she decided to pursue the matter in court - a fascinating, excruciating section of the book that sees her pushed to the very limits.

Because above all else, Tuttle has never thought of herself as a victim. She is determined not to be defined by the accident - to accept her good fortune and move on with her life, her work and her relationship. But something keeps pulling her back to the moment, and where it all fits.

She is, today, still deeply traumatised by what happened to her, even as she relives it night after night on the stage - descending a staircase on set - and having written this second memoir which places it at the centre.

She doesn't know whether anything has changed at those buildings with the silent, deadly lifts and, in a way, it doesn't matter. The role of victim was one she was forced to play - but for a short time only. And she has plans to visit again.

Above all, My Sweet Guillotine is also a love letter - an older, wiser love letter to Paris, a place that has a majestic, wonderful indifference to her and her needs, and yet seems able to fulfil them so completely.

By the time she returns, she has met the man who will become her husband, and their love blossoms in the cobbled streets - how could it not? She also comes into her own as an artist, forced to confront her own limitations and push herself as a writer and actor, and find her place in a city that has so much room for people like her, in a country that supports the arts as a kind of moral imperative.

It's intoxicating for someone desperate to experiment, to find meaning in failure, in works that are constantly evolving.

My Sweet Guillotine by Jayne Tuttle. Hardie Grant. 256pp. $32.99