A HYMN TO LIFE: Shame Has to Change Sides, by Gisèle Pelicot; translated by Natasha Lehrer and Ruth Diver
In a world that’s become a big, stinking multimedia document dump — I’m looking at you, Epstein files, or actually I’m leaving that to the professionals — Gisèle Pelicot’s new memoir, “A Hymn to Life,” is a reminder of organized narrative’s simple power.
Written with Judith Perrignon (who previously worked with the Holocaust survivor Marceline Loridan-Ivens), it alternates between describing how Pelicot’s life was knit together over decades with her longtime husband Dominique’s — and chronicling the abrupt, very public unraveling soon after he was caught taking upskirt photos in a supermarket.
Turns out this was just a side hobby. Monsieur Pelicot, a retired French electrician and real estate agent, had also been routinely documenting how he and a parade of cretins from the dark web (and at least one neighbor) subjected his wife, the mother of their three children, to repeated and brutal rape over the course of a decade.
He used a drug cocktail including lorazepam, that onetime punchline on “The White Lotus,” to sedate her into prolonged spells of unconsciousness — once slipping it into the mashed potatoes with olive oil and parsley.
Replete with details of modest domesticity in modern France, “A Hymn to Life” is also a rousing feminist manifesto, thanks to the phalanx that accompanied Gisèle, in protest and protectiveness, to the Palais de Justice each morning of the trial. It seeks a proper transfer of shame from sex-crime victims to their perpetrators, and the perpetrators’ enablers.
“Parrots, deplorable mouthpieces, violent, cowardly little people,” Pelicot writes of those who tried to sully her in court, refusing to name them. “I want all that remains of them to be the words they used to trample over me, to reduce one woman — and therefore all women — to absolute submission in the name of male domination.”
Dominique Pelicot was convicted of raping his wife, and another assailant’s wife, among other charges. He has admitted to attempted rape of another woman using ether in 1999 and is being questioned in a 1991 murder involving the same chemical, which he has denied.
As if in defiance of those who rendered her inert for so many hours, Gisèle strode back into nature with her bulldog, Lancôme. “I walked for hours through the forest and across the dunes, to the sound of the surf and the tides,” she writes. “It is only by moving, by scouring myself with the elements, that I am able to confront my grief.”
If the author had renounced men for all time, that would be perfectly understandable, but at 73, she has a new boyfriend, a former purser for Air France. She writes of working through the terrible revelations with her two sons, the younger coming to see his father as “the devil.” (Even more agonizingly: Her daughter, also subjected to deeply creepy photo treatment, has accused him of worse.)
On the day 50 sentences were handed down, the male police officer who uncovered the cache of horror on the ringleader’s electronics came to the courtroom, gallantly telling her, “It will be an honor for me to ensure your safety.”
And there is the memory of her father, a professional soldier and classical-music lover: gentle, beloved and bereaved.
Born Gisèle Guillou in 1952, she tenderly evokes an early childhood in West Germany during postwar reconstruction, and the family’s move to Azay-le-Ferron, France, where she was aware she was descended from peasant stock as she played on the grounds of empty castles.
Her mother died of cancer when Gisèle was 9, and her father remarried a cartoonishly cruel and miserly woman whom Gisèle nicknamed Folcoche, after a character in Hervé Bazin’s novel “Viper in the Fist.” Her best friend from school predicted that she’d become a writer like Colette, the pioneer of intimate autofiction.
Gisèle and Dominique met when they were only 19, and one could choose to see poetic foreshadowing in the circumstances: “I’d been stung between the eyes by a wasp that day,” she writes, “the venom was circulating, my eyelids were so swollen I could barely see.”
Their marriage was happy for decades, if financially precarious and subject to the husband’s increasingly outré sexual demands. She found steadier, more satisfying work than he did, rising to logistics executive at a utility company — “I had become part of the bourgeoisie” — and in her 30s had an affair with a colleague and family friend. After he found out, Dominique, whose own sporadically employed father was domineering and violent, threatened to smash a chair over her head.
But to notice the loose stitches in their story of general contentment — a glass of beer that turned green; bleach stains on a new pair of trousers — is to suggest absurdly that there was something Gisèle should have seen or sensed to prevent the crimes committed against her, including oral rape so rough it loosened a dental crown while she was comatose. (He helped extract it, which was big of him.)
After the violations began, Gisèle’s body began sending confusing signals: memory lapses, gynecological problems caused by the douches her husband administered. He was by her side at doctors’ visits, joking that she might be straying while he was at work.
How eerily apt that he was an electrician. Along with the prison term that will carry him into senescence, Monsieur Pelicot should get the Charles Boyer Lifetime Achievement Award for gaslighting. And Madame a big, lucrative best seller, for overcoming.
A HYMN TO LIFE: Shame Has to Change Sides | By Gisèle Pelicot | Translated by Natasha Lehrer and Ruth Diver | Penguin Press | 256 pp. | $32
Alexandra Jacobs is a Times book critic and occasional features writer. She joined The Times in 2010.
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