Content warning: This article contains mentions of sexual assault and domestic abuse.
Gisèle Pelicot’s book, A Hymn to Life, is not a memoir about suffering. Here, we consider how she constructs herself on the page: not as a headline, but as a woman who refuses to be defined by what was done to her.
Gisèle Pelicot’s story has been told by hundreds of people across the world, in countless different ways. In her memoir, A Hymn to Life, she reclaims that story and tells it in her own words – not as a headline, nor as a symbol, but as a woman. I will not attempt to retell her experiences here. Instead, this article considers the powerful language, striking images, and conflicting memories that interweave to construct Gisèle as she presents herself: not solely as a victim of violence, but as a survivor determined to retain ownership of her life.
The title of the book, A Hymn to Life, immediately signals Gisèle’s intention. It is not a story of suffering, nor even of survival alone, but of life as a whole. She shows her reader that her identity expands far beyond the confines of her criminal husband and the control he sought to exert over her. She has had a family, friendships, a career, and decades of memories that cannot be erased by the crimes committed against her. This memoir, therefore, becomes an act of resistance: a refusal to allow violence to define the totality of her existence.
One of the first aspects that struck me was the way Gisèle reflects on her relationships with the other men in her life and how these shaped her into a woman who perhaps overlooked – I or chose to overlook – the red flags presented by the man she loved. She writes of her father and brother as figures she felt compelled to protect, particularly after the tragic death of her mother when she was nine. Her father’s second wife, a forceful and cruel presence who rejected any mention of Gisèle’s mother, seems to have reinforced this instinct to shield and care for the men around her.
This pattern extended to the young man she met at nineteen, who came from a home marked by abuse and fragility. He would later become her husband, describing their meeting as “the end of the nightmare”. Gisèle believed they had saved one another from repeating the cycles of their parents’ lives. “I would be his cure and he would be mine”, she writes. There is something deeply revealing in this desire for mutual salvation and in this way Gisèle’s memoir invites readers to consider how early trauma can distort perceptions of love, safety, and responsibility. When she reflects that ‘the black hole of my childhood sucked everything into it, extinguishing any question, suspicion or grievance’, it becomes clear that her silence was not down to her husband’s successful deception alone, but the product of earlier wounds that shaped what she believed she deserved – or could survive.
Knowing what we do now about how Gisèle’s marriage ended, it is difficult for an outsider to understand her decision to hold on to some of the happy memories from their fifty years together. Even her own children, particularly her eldest, David and Caroline, struggle to comprehend her continued ‘protection’ of their father, a tension that has painfully strained their relationships. Yet Gisèle offers a striking explanation: ‘I partitioned Dominique into two, the same way I somehow managed to separate my violated body from my sense of self. I was not protecting him, I was protecting myself. That was how I was slowly able to begin the process of mourning’. This act of partitioning is psychologically complex. It is neither forgiveness nor denial. Rather, it is a strategy of survival. Gisèle explains that if she were to strip every positive memory from those fifty years, she would be left with a void – a gaping absence where more than half her life once stood. He took so much from her; in this compartmentalisation, Gisèle refuses to let him take her memories as well.
To me, this is one of the most powerful aspects of the memoir. Her separation of the rapist from the husband is not an attempt to excuse him, but to preserve herself. It allows her to mourn the man she loved – even if that man may never truly have existed. In doing so, she asserts ownership over her narrative.
Another significant element of A Hymn to Life is the solidarity Gisèle experiences with other women after the truth comes to light. She writes that ‘[f]emale friendship made this difficult period of my life easier; it was like rediscovering the closeness of young girls sighing and dreaming together, wondering what the future might hold’. There is something restorative in this return to female intimacy – a reclamation not only of safety but of girlhood.
She reconnects with friends she had lost over the years, notably Pascale, whom she had distanced herself from after Pascale criticised her husband’s unsettling behaviour. Despite decades apart, their friendship resumes with remarkable immediacy, and Pascale remains by her side during the trial’s most painful moments. Beyond her personal circle, Gisèle also draws strength from the women who attended the trial and wrote to her, sharing their own experiences of assault and abuse. What begins as personal trauma becomes part of a collective reckoning.
Although she does not wish to be a symbol, she becomes one: “and here I am, in my seventies, a martyr, the symbol of a new feminist wave that I hardly know a thing about. This time I won’t turn away from it”. There is a tension here between reluctance and acceptance. Gisèle does not seek martyrdom, yet she recognises the responsibility that visibility brings. The memoir subtly explores what it means to be transformed from private citizen to public emblem – and the cost of that transformation.
In writing this article, I have made the conscious decision not to centre Gisèle’s husband. Enough has been written about him. While I am struck by her ability to compartmentalise him, I believe the greater critical focus should now rest on her. Gisèle has chosen to keep her name – the name she has carried for over fifty years – so that her children and grandchildren need not feel shame in it. In doing so, she refuses the cultural impulse to rebrand herself solely as a victim. The name remains hers.
I will end with several lines that, to me, encapsulate Gisèle’s grace, power, and refusal to be reduced:
“My world contained more than just him.”
“Love is not dead. I am not dead. I still have faith in people. Once, that was my greatest weakness. Now it is my strength. My revenge.”
“I will never be reduced to my tortured body; that is not where my soul is. It’s not who I was as a girl, nor is it the woman I have become.”
In A Hymn to Life, Gisèle Pelicot does not deny suffering. She situates it within a life that is larger, older, and more enduring than violence. The memoir ultimately becomes what its title promises: not a testament to trauma alone, but a deliberate and defiant hymn to life.
