The French woman who received the first partial face transplant has described her difficulty in “living” with the woman whose features she acquired in the pioneering operation.

Isabelle Dinoire, 40, has given her fullest account of her struggle to assume what feels like a new identity, including the difficulties she has in forming a kiss. “One day I said, ‘My nose is itching’. I looked at my daughter and said: ‘That’s nonsense. It’s not my nose. I have a nose that is itching’,” she said. Ms Dinoire has also noticed that a hair had sprouted from her chin. “I had never had one. You knew it’s yours but at the same time ‘she’ is there. I am making her live, but that hair is hers,” she says in Le baiser d’Isabelle (Isabelle’s Kiss), a book by Noëlle Châtelet

Surgeons replaced the nose, lips and chin of Ms Dinoire with those of a 47-year-old woman two years ago. The donor died after hanging herself, according to media reports that have been neither confirmed nor denied by the medical team.

In her only recent interview, last July, Ms Dinoire, from the northern town of Valenciennes, said that she felt she had lost part of her identity.

In the book, to be published this week, Ms Dinoire described the feeling of sharing her body. The book was quoted by the newspaper Le Journal du Dimanche. Ms Châtelet, the sister of Lionel Jospin, the former Prime Minister, wrote: “She sometimes feels lost in her quest for an identity reshaped by the hands of experts.”

Ms Dinoire explained the disgust that she initially felt after the operation, carried out to restore features that had been mutilated when her dog mauled her as she slept under the influence of a high dose of sleeping pills.

“Having the inside of the mouth of someone else . . . It didn’t belong to me. It was atrocious,” she said.

Ms Dinoire’s mouth no longer hangs open and her speech has greatly improved. Making the motions of a kiss with her lips remains one of the toughest gestures. Her doctor, identified as Sylvie, told her: “No one is sure whether you will be able to kiss again.”

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