Gisèle Pelicot’s memoir “could easily be a catalogue of horrors, and to some degree it is”, said Hadley Freeman in The Times. But what makes it such a “compelling” read is how it reveals what happens when “an atomic bomb of cruelty erupts within a seemingly normal family”.
‘Unsparing’ tale
Pelicot was 67 when, in 2020, her husband of nearly five decades was arrested for upskirting a woman in a French supermarket. The police searched his electronic devices and, when they found a cache of thousands of images and videos of him and other men raping her while she was unconscious, Pelicot “entered a nightmare”, said Emma Brockes in The Guardian.
In her memoir, she manages to capture “something glimpsed” at the 2024 trial of her husband and her other rapists (for which she waived her right to anonymity): “the transformation of Gisèle Pelicot from a self-avowedly ordinary woman” into a “figure of astonishing power”. In this “riveting account of her ordeal”, she makes it her “unsparing mission” to recount what it took to become a “national – if not global – icon”. This powerful book is a “rousing feminist manifesto” that “seeks a proper transfer of shame from sex-crime victims to their perpetrators, and the perpetrator’s enablers”, said Alexandra Jacobs in The New York Times.
It’s an “extraordinarily courageous book”, said Freeman in The Times. Translators Ruth Diver and Natasha Lehrer have done an “excellent job” of relaying Pelicot’s “tone of determined control and occasional broken anguish” as she attempts to make sense of how the “gentle young man she married became one of the world’s most notorious rapists and abusers, without her even noticing”.
No ‘victim narrative’
This is far from a “misery memoir”, said Anita Singh in The Telegraph. Nor does it subscribe to a “victim narrative”. Instead, Pelicot attempts to “confront the complexity of her feelings for the man who betrayed her”. Refusing to “relinquish the fond memories” she shared with him, she “takes us back to their courtship in 1971” when Dominque was “kind, shy, attentive”. Both were eager to leave behind “unhappy childhoods, hers marred by the early death of her mother, his by dysfunction and abuse”.
When her daughter, Caroline, later shares concerns that she, too, might have been one of Dominique’s victims after photos are discovered of her in her underwear, Pelicot “clings to the fact that there is no further evidence of abuse”. It’s “uncomfortable” to read her “refusal to acknowledge her daughter’s deepest fears”. Today, mother and daughter are no longer in contact.
Pelicot spends many pages wondering if she should have known that “her husband was a monster” or “sensed” something wasn’t right, said Monica Hesse in The Washington Post. “But the simple answer is no. Of course not.” There are some things that “no human could possibly guard against”. The overarching message seems to be that when something “of this magnitude” befalls you, there is “no point” examining whether you should have done something differently. “There is only putting one foot in front of the other. There is only what it takes to survive.”
A Hymn to Life is a ‘riveting’ account of Pelicot’s ordeal and a ‘rousing feminist manifesto’
