Gisèle Pelicot’s A Hymn to Life: a memoir of survival, shame and reinvention
Gisèle Pelicot’s new memoir, A Hymn to Life, reads at once like a personal excavation and a public manifesto. Pelicot confronts a past she does not fully remember and a betrayal that has reverberated far beyond her home: her husband’s arrest in 2020 led to the discovery that he had drugged and filmed her being assaulted by dozens of men. The book resists easy categorization — it is part detective story, part intimate reckoning — and in its candour charts how a seemingly ordinary life was remade into one of surprising moral force.
A private nightmare made public
Pelicot’s account begins with the shock of revelation. Her husband, Dominique, had been living a secret life that culminated in criminal proceedings and what will likely be a lifetime in prison. The details that emerged — a cache of videos and images showing Pelicot unconscious and assaulted by scores of men, and evidence he had recruited attackers online — turned a domestic horror into a national conversation. For Pelicot, the immediate aftermath meant confronting the most immediate questions: how could this have happened under her roof, and how had she not known?
She writes with blunt self-scrutiny about the shame of perceived ignorance: "the shame of having understood nothing - of feeling like an idiot in the eyes of others, and in my own. " That shame propels much of the memoir’s momentum. Pelicot sifts through memories and everyday details, hunting for clues that might explain her husband’s behaviour and her own blind spots. The search is unsentimental and precise; it often reads like a mystery in miniature, with Pelicot as both investigator and subject.
A literary act of recovery
What makes Pelicot’s book unusual is the way it traces not only victimhood but transformation. She keeps her married name so that grandchildren who carry it might be proud rather than ashamed. She relocates, first leaving the village where the couple lived and later moving to the Île de Ré, where she tries to articulate her altered inner state to new acquaintances. She tells them she had "been struck head-on by a high speed train, " an image that captures both the suddenness of the trauma and the ongoing process of repair.
The memoir is alive with detail that could belong in a novel: the small gestures, the conversations, the rural rhythms that framed a marriage of almost fifty years. But it is the moral and psychological renewal at the book’s centre that gives it real heft. By documenting what it took to move from bewilderment and humiliation to a posture of defiant clarity, Pelicot turns the book into an account of agency as much as of loss.
Questions of memory, culpability and culture
Pelicot’s investigation extends beyond personal recollection into family history and social context. She considers whether her husband’s violent behaviour was shaped by the abusive environment in which he grew up, and whether wider forces — a patriarchal culture that normalises male power and secrecy — played a role. These reflections are hard-won: Pelicot admits she would "never have uttered" words like "our patriarchal, sexist society" before the scandal shattered her assumptions.
She also examines the dynamics of the marriage itself. Both came from rural, economically strained backgrounds; she prospered professionally, advancing from a secretarial job to management, while he struggled with employment and resentment. The couple’s private sexual life, long unexamined, becomes another piece of a complicated puzzle. Pelicot’s method is patient; she offers no neat, single explanation but a layered portrait that invites readers to weigh multiple factors.
In the end, A Hymn to Life is less a testimony seeking validation than a sustained act of meaning-making. Pelicot refuses to conform to any external agenda; the result is a memoir that turns trauma into testimony and bewilderment into a source of strength. The book is a plea for understanding that also delivers a clearer, harder-eyed view of what it takes to survive and to speak afterward.
