Autofictional testimony, therapeutic writing, and self-empowerment: Gisèle Pelicot

J'ai retrouvé mes mots

Gisèle Pelicot's book And the joy of living (German title: “A Hymn to Life – Shame Must Change Sides”), which Gisèle Pelicot published in early 2026 together with journalist Judith Perrignon, has received press coverage that extends far beyond a mere account of the trial. Many observers were particularly surprised by the tone and thematic emphasis, which clearly distinguishes itself from the hard facts of the criminal proceedings in Avignon. The book was celebrated less as a court document and more as a “hymn to resilience.” It shifted the discussion from the mere punishment of perpetrators to the question of how a victim regains autonomy over their own life story.

Explicit statements about the book's purpose and writing style are scarce in the book itself—but this is significant in itself. There is no prologue, no afterword, no poetics-based self-description in the true sense. A direct statement about the book can be found in the blurb at the end, that is, in the paratext, not in the main text—and it sounds more like a press release: “Je veux raconter mon histoire avec mes propres mots. J'espère transmettre un message de force et de courage à tous ceux qui font face à l'adversité.” This is the tone of the public figure Gisèle Pelicot, not that of the narrator in the book. But what the text implicitly reveals about the writing process is far more interesting:

Firstly, in Chapter 1, she immediately marks the autofictional decision – “To write our story, I use my first name” – as a conscious act of linguistic sovereignty. She creates a narrative voice for herself by clarifying the rights to name names.

Secondly, there is a peculiar mirror scene: Caroline had once advised her husband, Dominique, to write down his childhood traumas. He did so. His text ends on the day of his encounter with Gisèle – “la fin du cauchemar” (the end of the slumber). The children later destroy the manuscript in Mazan. Pelicot's book is thus structurally a response to Dominique's writing, which was destroyed and which obscured the victim's perspective. She writes the story he could not or was not allowed to write.

Thirdly, there is a very specific origin story of the text that became her court appearance: Her lawyer, Antoine, asked her to write down her story, had her rewrite it – “il est important que tout le monde sache qui vous êtes” – and then trained her to speak without paper. The sentence “Non, laisse les papiers, Gisèle, on dirait qu'elle récite” is highly charged with poetics: The forced embodiment of the text, the overcoming of the dead letter by the living voice, is precisely what the book itself attempts.

Fourth: As a teenager, her best friend Françoise prophesied that she would become a writer – “like Colette.” This sentence appears unobtrusively in the text, without commentary. But it places the book within a literary tradition: Colette, the writer who wrote from experience, from the female body and her own biography, who knew no shame and ignored genre boundaries. This is surely no coincidence.

Fifthly, and finally: The sentence “J’ai retrouvé mes mots, le fil de mon histoire” – written on the first night after the shock, when she locked herself in her daughter’s guest room – shows that regaining language is synonymous with regaining the self. The story is not an account of the self; it constitutes it. Pelicot has no explicit writing program because writing is not a program for her, but a necessity of life – which is what distinguishes therapeutic literature from documentary literature.

The evening before: Ritual as a protective barrier and autofictional framing

The book's opening sentence is neither a report nor a lament. It is a ritual: "Je prépare toujours la table du petit-déjeuner la veille" (I always prepare the breakfast table the night before). This seemingly banal gesture—cups, plates, cutlery, napkins, honey, and jam—immediately becomes the key poetic and psychological scene: "C'est comme sauter la nuit, que je redoute toujours, et sceller l'harmonie du lendemain" (It is like leaping out of the night, which I always keep hidden, and seals off the harmony of the next day). Night is something to be skipped. Evening is a sealing against what is to come. Breakfast—this archaic image of the table, which Pelicot traces back to her grandmother's large kitchen table—becomes the central metaphor of the entire book: an order defended against chaos, a promise to the following morning.

Here begins the autofictional dimension of the work, which distinguishes it from a mere factual account. EJV is not a memoir in the conventional sense. Despite the unmistakable referentiality of the events described, it is a literary work, fully aware of its own constructed nature. The act of writing is an act of naming, of sovereignty, of decision-making. She chooses what she calls her husband. She writes her story, even though it deals with her being overwhelmed.

This autofictional gesture permeates the entire work. Pelicot constructs herself as a narrator who knows she is telling a story—and who understands this construction as a therapeutic, political, and literary act. “Je veux raconter mon histoire avec mes propres mots,” she writes in the final chapter. This sentence could serve as the motto of the entire book. It is a manifesto of narrative self-determination.

Trauma knows no chronology: Dissociation as a narrative principle.

The message Gisèle Pelicot receives at the Carpentras police headquarters on November 2, 2020, has a radical literary consequence: it disrupts the narrative. The text reacts to the unfathomable with dissociation – not only as a psychological state of the character, but as a structural principle of the book itself.

When the policeman shows her the first photos, her reaction is: “Non, ce n'est pas moi.” The threefold negation—three times a photo is shown, three times she answers “Non”—is not a lie, but a literal non-recognition. “Elle ressemblait à une poupée de chiffon.” The woman in the photo is physically close to her and psychologically completely alien, a rag doll. This split between self and the “body thing in the photo” is the first and most fundamental trauma reaction, and it becomes the book’s primal narrative experience: How does one return to oneself when one does not recognize oneself?

Dissociation manifests itself in the text on several levels. First: the narration of the past as a defense mechanism. No sooner has Pelicot received the shocking diagnosis than the text escapes into the idyll of childhood, into the landscape of the Indre, into his grandmother's kitchen. These flashbacks are not mere exposition; they are the narrative equivalent of the psychological mechanism that trauma theorists discuss: the inability to inscribe the unbearable into linear memory, and the flight into islands of comfort.

Secondly, the book rejects a strict chronology. The revelations trickle in—just as Gisèle herself received them. The full truth about Dominique isn't revealed at the beginning, but unfolds layer by layer: first the arrest for voyeurism, then the drugging and rapes, then the old unsolved cases (attempted rape, suspected murder), then the intrusive photos taken by the daughter. Each of these chapters rewrites the preceding state of certainty. The reader experiences the traumas not as a flashback, but as a processual upheaval—a structurally precise approach analogous to the therapeutic process: one can only endure what one receives in small doses.

The body as an archive of forgetting is also a central motif. Pelicot had suffered from memory lapses for years: hair appointments she didn't remember; phone calls she didn't recall; drowsiness her husband interpreted as exhaustion. "Mes trous de mémoire s'agrandissaient. Je les redoutais." What she had taken for a neurological condition—possibly a tumor like her mother's—was the trace of chemical violence. The text retrospectively rereads her own bodily memory: the limp hand at lunch, the arm that no longer obeyed when Florian said goodbye. This moment is named in the book with brutal directness: "Aller me coucher, oui. Être violée, et violée quelques heures après le départ de notre fils."

The family as a genealogical history of violence: Gisèle and the Pelicots

One of the book's most literarily dense projects is the archaeology of the Pelicot family. Gisèle Pelicot describes Dominique's parents with precise sociological and psychological insight. His father, Denis Pelicot, is introduced as a tyrannical patriarch: "His father, Denis Pelicot, spoke only in crisis." He controls Dominique's salary, empties his savings account when he learns of the marriage plans, buys a country house, and demands that his son renovate it. The mother, Juliette, is a woman who exudes a "lasse de vivre"—a victim who has not developed a language for her situation. From her, the son learns the muteness of submission; from his father, the language of subjugating others.

The scene, which Pelicot only learns about during the trial, illuminates the whole situation with particular cruelty: she discovers that as a teenager, Dominique watched his parents at the campsite—his mother on her knees, her hands tied behind her back, forced to perform fellatio by his father. “I learned about it at the trial.” This scene, which reveals Dominique’s sexual socialization under the shadow of paternal violence, is used by Pelicot neither as an excuse nor as a trivialization—but as an explanation that she herself cannot fully bear. The book asks: Does the son of violence become the perpetrator—or is that too simplistic a causal link?

Pelicot's own family history is no less fraught with trauma, but different. Her mother died of bone cancer when she was nine. Her father, a career soldier, was absent or devastated. Her stepmother was unloving and humiliating. Pelicot portrays herself as a child who learned early on not to expect help and not to break down: "The more my brother hid, the more I fortified myself. I was the little warrior of joy." This formulation is significant—the "little warrior of joy" is not a naive optimist, but someone who developed joy as a strategy of resistance, as a sense of duty towards her dead mother.

The mother is treated with an almost hymnic fervor in the text. The first memory of her death contains one of the most lyrically powerful scenes: the little girl shaking her mother by the shoulder while her father closes her eyes. “Je secoue doucement ma mère par l'épaule pour la réveiller.” This impulse—to awaken the dead woman—recurs throughout the book: as Pelicot resists the looming transformation into her mother her entire life, as she believes she is dying of a brain tumor, as she realizes that she did not truly belong to herself in her own sleep.

The question of prudery—a word Dominique used to describe her—is carefully examined in the book. Dominique calls her "une sainte" (a saint) and says, "Tu aurais pu vivre dans un couvent, tu n'as pas de phantasmes" (You could have lived in a convent, you have no fantasies). Pelicot distances herself from this label without denying it. She describes her own sexuality as one that requires belonging: "Je ne supporterais pas qu'on me touche. Que je devais avoir des sentiments" (I would not tolerate being touched. I would have to have feelings). This is not prudery in the clerical sense, but rather an insistence on the connection between body and meaning. Rape in sleep is the exact opposite of this idea: a body touched without the person being present. Pelicot's "prudery," seen in this light, was an affirmation of herself.

Shame that changes sides: Self-empowerment through language and names

Shame is the recurring theme of the book, and it is the theme whose development most clearly exhibits a narrative dramaturgy. At the beginning, when Gisèle tells her friend Sylvie the truth, she writes: “Une vague de honte m'envahit en voyant l'impensable sur le visage de Sylvie.” Shame strikes her—she, the rape victim. This is not an irony of the book, but its diagnosis: shame is sedimented in the language of victims.

Months later, as she sits alone before the judge, she writes: “J’avais encore une honte immense.” The shame clings to her like the alien label of someone else’s crime. The rhetorical shift only comes during the trial. Strolling on the beach one day, a refrain rises within her: “La honte doit changer de camp.” This sentence—which appears in the book as an inner echo, not as an external directive—becomes a turning point. It is not she who is to bow her head. It is the fifty-one defendants who are to do so.

This transformation of shame is closely linked to the question of names, and here the book develops its own nomenclature of self-determination. When the press first reports on the case, she asks her lawyer under which name she should appear. She chooses "Marie"—her middle name, but also the name of her maternal grandmother: "la femme la plus forte que j'aie jamais connue" (the strongest woman I had ever known). She hides behind the strength of her ancestor. When her daughter Caroline protests (a cousin is also named Marie), she switches to "Françoise"—her third name, the name of her unknown paternal grandmother who died young: "Je ne me réfugiais plus derrière la grand-mère qui avait illuminé mon enfance, mais derrière un fantôme" (I no longer sought refuge behind my grandmother who illuminated my childhood, but behind a ghost). This is a remarkable self-analysis: she names that she initially hides behind symbolic strength and then behind nothingness.

Crucially, she reverts to her birth name. When she moves alone to the Île de Ré, she recounts: “J’ai écrit ‘Guillou’ sur la boîte aux lettres.” Gisèle Guillou. Not Gisèle Pelicot, not Marie, not Françoise. The woman from Indre, the dead mother’s child, her father’s daughter—she, who fifty years earlier in Azay-le-Ferron had adopted the name Pelicot. This return to her maiden name is a return to her origins, to her pre-Dominique self, but not a nostalgic one: it is the reclaiming of a disrupted subjectivity.

The book ends with a woman calling herself "Gisèle Pelicot"—but it is now a self-chosen name, not an inherited one. In the final chapter: "I am no longer the wife under the shock of the police station. I am no longer the person I was before discovering Dominique's true nature. I am moving forward." The name Pelicot is now occupied by her own testimony, not by his crimes.

The court as a stage

The trial, which takes place in Avignon from September to December 2024, occupies the majority of the book. Here, the trauma narrative becomes court reporting—but also an analysis of the staging. Pelicot describes the courtroom with the sensitivity of a theater director. The defendant, Dominique Pelicot, sits "slightly elevated, behind a glass panel, in a padded armchair given to him because of his painful leg, which reinforced the domineering attitude he had always possessed." Even his prosthetic hip becomes a dramatic element of dominance.

Pelicot's decision to open the proceedings to the public is the narrative climax of the book. She describes the moment this decision is made with great care: she goes for a walk, the sea breeze caresses her, and suddenly the many months of isolation are compressed into a single insight: "Je ressentais physiquement le besoin du reste du monde." The physical is crucial—not the legal consideration, but a somatic signal. Opening the trial is an opening of the body to the outside, a unsealing.

In court, in one of the book's most rhetorically powerful moments, she explains her decision: "It is not courage, but the will and determination to evolve this patriarchal and sexist society." What is remarkable is what is left unsaid: no invocation of atonement, no emphasis on suffering. She places herself within a social movement while simultaneously distancing herself from the role of martyr. "I would never have said these things before." This, too, is enshrined in the book: the new language as a sign of transformation.

The women's solidarity manifested in front of the court is described by Pelicot in hymnal terms: "I felt their warmth, their emotion, their vulnerability blending into mine." The collective appears here as an extension and empowerment of the individual. The women who queue daily, who write letters, who sing on the court steps—they are not mere scenery, but co-authors of their own liberation. "This crowd saved me."

The defendants' defense systematically attempts to redefine the victim as the perpetrator. Pelicot interprets the tactical questions—had she locked the bathroom door? Did her hip movements indicate consent?—not only as legal attacks but also as symptoms of a cultural malaise: “J'ai dit au tribunal que je comprenais pourquoi les victimes de viol ne portaient pas plainte, car elles finissaient par être accusées.” This sentence is the political core of the book.

When a lawyer shouts, "You've certainly found it, Mme Pelicot!", she leaves the courtroom—not out of weakness, but in protest. She leaves the courtroom only twice in four months. This is a measure of her resilience—but also a literary measure: she endures so much that it becomes too much, and then she names the threshold.

Images of light, warmth, and love: A life-affirming counter-reading.

Against the darkness of violence, the book sets a persistent symbolism of light that is not naive but carefully crafted. The motif of the breakfast table recurs at crucial points. The coffee, the toasted bread, the jam—these are not sentimental emblems, but the concrete elements of a continuity that resists rupture. The grandmother making cheese in the cellar, the grandmother drying sheets on the clothesline: these are images of a hands-on love for everyday life that Pelicot embodies.

The Indre landscape of her childhood, with its castles and fields, is also a light-filled counter-space. “Je n'ai jamais rêvé d'être une princesse,” writes Pelicot—and this negation is itself an image: she is not a fairytale subject, but a child of the people, inhabiting the beauty of the world without hubris. The castles are real and indifferent; the beauty lies in the awareness with which one sees them.

Light reappears in the description of Île de Ré, in a poetic passage from the book: “Je vivais sur une île. Je me sentais comme une petite île.” The island initially represents isolation—a separation from the mainland of human meanness. But the metaphor shifts: the marshland reflects the pink of the sunset in the evening, and in summer, roses grow through the asphalt. “Ces fleurs qui perçaient la terre et l'asphalte, s'élevant vers le ciel avec un désir d'exister comparable au nôtre.” This is a truly lyrical image—growth as desire, rising as a response to gravity.

The love for Jean-Loup that develops on the island is an unexpectedly tender part of the book. It is not romantically exaggerated, but precisely observed in its genesis: two people, each with a lover who died young, both taking walks. “Saying ‘I love you’ was painful.” But this inability is also a kind of sincerity; it is not about a redemptive love that heals everything, but about a love that settles into the realm of possibility. When Jean-Loup tells her that the decision regarding the public proceedings is hers, and that he will support her, “as if he had been expecting it”—this sentence contains all the dignity of a love that respects autonomy.

The fragile reconstruction: scarring, relocation, autonomy

The book's final chapter looks to the future, but without a triumphal gesture. Pelicot describes herself on a beach in Brittany—the beach where her parents once left footprints in the sand, footprints that have long since faded. She is there with Jean-Loup, and this "after"—after the trial, after the conviction, after everything—is not an ending, but a continuation.

The move to Île de Ré was the first sign of reconstruction: with her birth name "Guillou" on the mailbox, with the small terrace bathed in morning sunlight, with coffee as a ritual of self-assertion. "Pour la première fois de ma vie, je vivais seule." This is a statement that might sound trivial in a German context—but for Pelicot, who had transitioned from her mother to Dominique, this first experience of being alone was a sign of the constitution of a subjectivity that had previously always been defined in relation to someone else.

The relationship with the children is not resolved, but fragmented, broken, in a cycle of healing and inflammation. There is ongoing tension with Caroline; the distance is painful. With David and Florian, there are tentative approaches. Pelicot writes without bitterness, but without embellishment: "Mes relations avec David et Caroline se sont distendues depuis le procès." The family is an open wound that is scarring – and scarring is not healing, but rather new skin, more sensitive than the old.

The scarring is also evident in her relationship to her own life story. Pelicot refuses to completely erase her shared history with Dominique, even though children and society seem to expect this. She writes: “I will probably spend the rest of my days exploring the mystery of my memories to save some of us. They will never reduce me to this tortured body.” This is the heart of her autofictional strategy: memories cannot be undone, but they can be reinterpreted, differentiated, and salvaged. The thirty years in which Dominique was a good father, a laughing husband, a Sunday football player—these years exist. They now coexist with the perpetrator's knowledge. To endure this coexistence without oversimplifying it is the ethical and narrative challenge of the book.

Pelicot ends the book with a figure from the circus—the tightrope walker: “Je suis comme un funambule, je dois continuer.” This image, which evokes her childhood memory of “La Piste aux étoiles” (a television circus program she watched in the evening when her mother died), is a poetic resonance space within the book. Balance on the rope is not a stable state, but a constant movement. Standing still means falling. Continuing is the only thing that can prevent a fall.

The life-affirming autonomy that the book ultimately portrays is radically unspectacular. It is the autonomy of the woman who makes her own coffee, chooses her own name, decides whether the hall is closed or opened, has a lover, a delicate and understated relationship with the widowed Jean-Loup. She rejects the role of martyr as much as that of icon: "I despise the victim mentality and I have never felt myself or considered myself an icon." What remains is the sentence from the first chapter, now imbued with new meaning: "Everything will be alright." Not as naiveté. As a sentence that has gazed into the abyss and yet still says: there will be breakfast tomorrow.

Appendix

Literary strategies in the book “Et la joie de vivre” by Gisèle Pelicot

Chapter 1

In this chapter, Gisèle Pelicot employs a starkly contrasting visual language to depict the transition from domestic normalcy to unimaginable horror. She meticulously describes the preparation of the breakfast table as a symbol of order and harmony, while the reality of the police investigation already casts its shadow. The linguistic shift from tender endearments like "Mino" to the formal distance of "Monsieur Pelicot" is particularly effective. These renamings underscore the husband's immediate rupture of identity, transforming him from a beloved partner into a stranger and perpetrator.

Chapter 2

The chapter employs a nostalgic flashback, portraying their first meeting in 1971 as a fateful event. Pelicot establishes the motif of a "pact" between two wounded souls who sought healing from their traumatic childhoods in their mutual love. The idyllic description of the rural Indre region serves as a painful contrast to the later discovery of the already simmering familial abysses. This framing emotionally deepens the impact of the subsequent betrayal on the reader.

Chapter 3

The chapter explores the psychological repression and shock conveyed through the motif of ritual house-cleaning. Pelicot describes how, upon returning from the police station, she immediately begins to erase the traces of the house search and wash Dominique's laundry. This "cleansing" symbolizes the futile attempt to reclaim the tainted reality and the lost control over her life. The chapter concludes with the inevitability of the truth, as she is forced to put the horror into words for her family.

Chapter 4

In this chapter, the author reflects on her childhood as a "little warrior of joy," which stands in stark contrast to the prevailing melancholy of her family. She uses the silence surrounding her mother's cancer and her stepmother's strictness as metaphors for a world where pain remains hidden. This strategy of "secrecy" in childhood explains her later inability to recognize the signs of abuse in her marriage. The connection between the early loss of her mother and her own fate weaves a web of genetic and emotional predisposition.

Chapter 5

Here, the inner turmoil is vividly portrayed as Gisèle tries to defend her 50-year love story against the new revelations. She insists that the happy moments were not mere illusions, but a real part of her life. The author uses the perspective of her dog, Lancôme, as a projection screen for her own sense of loss and longing for the familiar comfort of home. This refusal to immediately erase the past lends the narrative a complex humanity that transcends a simple victimhood narrative.

Chapter 6

The chapter focuses on the medical and forensic deconstruction of her body, which now serves as evidence. Pelicot describes the humiliating process of gynecological examinations and the chemical analysis of her hair, all aimed at proving the “toxic” truth. The literary strategy lies in contrasting the clinical coldness of the facts with her years of false certainty that she was suffering from an incurable disease like Alzheimer's. The sale of her furniture, particularly the “bed of horrors,” marks the final physical break with her old life.

Chapter 7

This chapter is a genealogical investigation of the Pelicot family, intended to uncover the origins of the violence. It paints a picture of the father-in-law, Denis, as an "ogre" who created an atmosphere of tyranny and sexual abuse. Dominique is initially portrayed in this context as a victim and "ally" of his suffering mother, which makes his later downfall all the more tragic. This historical account serves to explain the underlying structure of the perversion without justifying it.

Chapter 8

The chapter uses the reunion with her old friend Pascale as an opportunity for self-reflection and a correction of her own memories. Pascale acts as a "mirror," revealing the early warning signs and Gisèle's idealization of Dominique. The author contrasts her professional emancipation at EDF with the simultaneous stifling atmosphere of her marriage due to Dominique's growing sexual demands. The theme of infidelity—both Dominique's and Gisèle's affairs with Didier—finally shatters the image of the perfect marriage.

Chapter 9

This chapter explores the disintegration of the family structure using the example of the first Christmas after the discovery. Pelicot employs the physical separation and the children's inability to enter the house to visualize the family's deep wound. The juxtaposition of festive anticipation and inner annihilation intensifies the feeling of utter isolation. This is particularly evident in the conflict between the siblings, each of whom copes differently with their father's betrayal.

Chapter 10

This chapter focuses on the literary portrayal of "Meeker Village" as a deceptive facade of bourgeois stability. Pelicot uses financial details such as loans and debts as metaphors for a reality built on shaky foundations. The supposed freedom of consumption is exposed as a form of slavery that Dominique used for manipulation. The "white divorce" of 1999 is presented here as a desperate but ultimately ineffective attempt at security within a deceitful system.

Chapter 11

Gisèle describes here the strategy behind her self-naming and the loss of anonymity due to the media. The choice of the pseudonym "Marie P." and the subsequent escape to the Île de Ré symbolize the attempt to construct a new, protected identity. The author uses the portrayal in sensationalist publications like "Nouveau Détective" to criticize the violence of public prejudgment and society's thirst for sensationalism. The retreat to the island thus becomes a metaphorical act of islanding, an escape from "human filth."

Chapter 12

This chapter broadens the focus from personal tragedy to a criminological investigation of Dominique's other crimes. The escalation is exploited when Pelicot learns that her husband is also a suspect in past murders and attempted rapes. The change of lawyers to Antoine Camus and Stéphane Babonneau marks a strategic realignment toward a more professional defense. This phase of the narrative depicts Gisèle's transition from passive witness to active participant in her own trial.

Chapter 13

This chapter traces the disillusionment brought about by the discovery of Dominique's voyeuristic activities in his private life. The revelation that he secretly filmed family members, including his daughters-in-law and grandchildren, shatters the last bastion of familial sanctity. The author uses the motif of the "doctor's game" as a metaphor for the husband's boundless breach of trust and his pedophilic tendencies. The chapter makes it clear that the "normality" of recent decades was a carefully constructed edifice of lies.

Chapter 14

This chapter marks the decisive turning point in the legal strategy: the abandonment of the "huis clos" (exclusion of the public). In a moment of inner strength, Gisèle chooses full transparency so that "the shame changes sides." The trial is elevated from a private tragedy to a universal manifesto against the "culture of rape." The support of her children in this decision solidifies the new family alliance against the perpetrator.

Chapter 15

This chapter describes the traumatic visual confrontation with the rape videos. Pelicot uses a detached, almost clinical language to describe the unbearable: her own lifeless body as Dominique's "garbage heap of fantasies." The separation between her consciousness and the depicted body serves as a necessary protective mechanism to bear the truth. This confrontation is the final stage of purification before she faces the perpetrators in court.

Chapter 16

In this chapter, the courtroom is staged as the scene of a collective awakening and feminist solidarity. Pelicot describes "dignity" as a form of conscious resistance against the arrogance of the accused. The "chorus of women" applauding outside the courthouse transforms the plaintiff into an icon of resistance. The confrontation with the defense attorneys, who try to avoid the word "rape," illustrates the struggle for the power to define the female body.

Chapter 17

This chapter examines Dominique's "split" between loving husband and sadistic abuser. Pelicot reflects on her own guilt and the question of "looking the other way" as she hears the stories of other victims, such as Mme Maréchal. The literary juxtaposition of Dominique's confessions and his brother Joël's lies exposes the toxic roots of the entire family. The chapter concludes with a verdict that functions less as revenge and more as a necessary end to a lifelong deception.

Chapter 18

The concluding chapter offers a literary summary and describes Gisèle's transformation. She uses the image of "rebirth from the ashes" to portray her journey from a shattered wife to an influential activist. Her experiences are no longer seen merely as personal wounds, but as a societal imperative to break the silence surrounding sexual violence. Ultimately, through her love for Jean-Loup and her attempts to reconcile with her past, she finds a way back to "the joy of life."

This article is written in German and can be found at https://rentree.de. Automatic translations into English and French are available. English, French.