Gisèle Pelicot’s compelling and moving memoir begins with the day she learned that over the course of at least nine years, she had been raped by her husband Dominique and around 80 other men, while she was drugged and unconscious.
On that first day of knowing, in November 2020, she was a few months shy of 68. Her memoir explores the aftermath of that knowing, but also rewinds to her parents’ courtship, her childhood and youth and each stage of her adult life. It reveals how her husband’s crimes forced her to recast her entire adult life to-date – and its relationship to her childhood.
Review: A Hymn to Life – Gisèle Pelicot (Bodley Head)
I moved between reading Gisèle’s chapters and daily reports of the Epstein files. As I read, recent charges were laid against men in Germany and Greater Manchester who also drugged and raped their wives for over a decade.
I wondered: what are the effects of this avalanche of revelations about the shadow lives of men – the wealthy, the famous and the seemingly ordinary? (Gisèle’s rapists were described by philosopher Zoe Williams as “a perfect randomised cross-section of society”.)
How is this public accounting of the thousands of documents, images, videos and testimonials to be processed, by survivors and non-survivors? When does the status quo, the structures of power that enable such abuses, give way to rage and its transformative potential?
The Pelicot case became an international story when Gisèle realised facing the 51 men police had been able to identify and charge (including her husband) in a closed court would rob her of support – and the opportunity to shift the burden of shame from victim to perpetrators.
Her decision to make the case public was an act of solidarity with other survivors – and a declaration of self worth that became increasingly audible as the trial proceeded. Have her actions nudged us closer to a tipping point?
When I reviewed the memoir of Pelicot’s daughter, Caroline Darian, a year ago, I asked: is sexual abuse under chemical submission a new frontier in our understandings of intimate partner violence?
The Pelicot case intersected with more established understandings of drink spiking and date rape. But this sustained injury – perpetrated in the final decade of a 49-year marriage, worsened by access to online communities of predators – revealed a distinct new hellscape in understandings of gendered violence, particularly domestic abuse.
In a terrible irony, Gisèle writes:
I had no interest in the internet and social media, and I had no idea of the extent to which they had altered human relationships.
Gisèle has been intermittently estranged from her two eldest children, David and Caroline, since November 2020. They are now tentatively reconciled. Caroline’s 2025 book, I’ll Never Call Him Dad Again, in part makes a case for activism as a form of survival. In the aftermath of the revelations about her father, Caroline established #MendorsPas (Don’t Put Me Under), a movement to raise awareness of sexual assault under chemical submission.
Her mother’s new memoir, far from going over familiar ground, offers a different story of survival.
Guillaume Horcajuelo/AAP
A legacy of trauma
Gisèle Pelicot was born in 1952 in West Germany, where her father was serving in the French army and “history’s open wounds and bitterness were all around us”. When she was five, they moved to rural France to be close to her mother’s family. Gisèle was nine when her adored mother died in their family kitchen, after years of being plagued by brain tumours.
Her brother and father never recovered from this death, but she resolved to pursue happiness as her mother had done in life. “I was a steadfast tin soldier of joy.” Gisèle did this with determination, in the face of limited schooling and her grief-stricken father’s jealous and cruel second wife. She described meeting Dominique at the age of 19 as “love at first sight”.
Dominique grew up within an oppressive family, where his efforts to protect his mother from his, domestically “all-powerful”, father’s violence failed. He suffered his own humiliations at the hands of the patriarch, too. The man had an incestuous relationship with a foster child taken into the family aged five, which became “official” when she was 25, after Dominique’s mother died.
Dominique once described his life before Gisele as a “nightmare”. But he felt safe with her. Their instant attraction was fortified by this sense of refuge. Building a family was how they would heal; at least this was the pact they made.
Caroline was born in 1979 into this marriage, the second of three children and the only daughter. Her mother’s career trajectory with France’s main electricity company had afforded the Pelicots’ upward class mobility. Dominique, an electrician and a real estate agent, was in and out of work. Occasionally he brought the couple to the brink of financial ruin, but they were buffered just enough by the stability of Gisèle’s employment.
On the whole, the Pelicot children enjoyed secure, loving childhoods focused on their opportunities to thrive. Each forged meaningful careers in adulthood, married and had children. Both Caroline’s and Gisèle’s memoirs depict comfort and security in the lives of Gisèle’s adult children and grandchildren, even as the shock of Dominique’s brutal betrayal begins to reverberate.
‘Inside an enormous shredder’
One of the great achievements of this book is Gisèle’s capacity to describe – with coherence and nuance – the singularity of her position. This includes her needs, which she finds must take precedence over those of her children if she is to survive.
She writes of her older two children:
They both wanted to be there for me, to protect me in their own way. But I felt as if they wanted to take possession of my life. I couldn’t bear that.
The determination to be happy that took Gisèle into the relationship with her then-husband is transformed into a determination to survive as she surveys the wreckage inflicted by his abuses and seeks a way out. During the years she was drugged, Gisèle felt like she was losing her mind.
Her memory failures, blackouts and exhaustion instilled in her a deep fear of brain tumours and the inheritance of her mother’s fate. As she comes to terms with the true source of these struggles, s