“I always set the table for breakfast the night before. I put out coffee cups, plates, cutlery, napkins, pots of honey and jam. Almost as a way of reaching across the hours of darkness that I fear, of proclaiming the harmony of the day…. That evening, as usual, I got everything ready. Even Dominique’s clothes…. I put out a pair of bottle-green corduroy trousers and a pink Lacoste polo shirt the children had given him.”
Thus begins Gisèle Pelicot’s searing, unforgettable, and strangely beautiful memoir, with the peaceful, deliberate, quotidian details of her and her husband’s retirement in Mazan, a small town in the South of France. She and Dominique had met as teenagers, fallen head over heels, raised three kids, and lived what she considered to be an ordinary but loving existence. Both came from Dickensian backgrounds: poverty, neglect, early loss. Dominique had been physically and sexually abused—Gisèle would find this out later—but they made a successful working-class life together, with all that entails: raising their kids, surviving money troubles, changing homes, jobs. These were stresses she could handle.
