Gisèle Pelicot tells her story for the very first time, not as victim, but as witness. Beginning in 2020, when she received the first phone call from a local police station, Gisèle recounts the fateful investigation that turned her life inside out.
Terrifically tense ... How immediately apparent the narrative’s dense, layered architecture, its impatience with ready-made language and scripts for sexual violence ... What Pelicot does, brilliantly and subtly, is to ask the question most avoid — not who, but how? With a kind of coolness and deliberation that feels aided by age, she explores the mechanisms by which one can become so practiced at turning away unwanted knowledge. And she is at her most devastating when she presents what she still cannot face.
