- January 25, 2023
L'enfant réparé - Book - Grégoire Delacourt - Grasset, 2021
Grégoire Delacourt, author of the best-selling "La liste de mes envies", recounts the impact on his adult life and well into his fifties of the incest his father inflicted on him at the age of five. It's a dented, fragmented life, until the death of his mother and the aging of his father led the writer to seek out "the dead child" within himself one winter's night, in an attempt to repair it with words. It's a book about the weight of silence, like a ball and chain that drags you down. It's also a book less about the father than about the author's mother, who understands, keeps silent and distances the child to protect him, yet condemns him to solitude. Grégoire Delacourt also transcribes moments of psychoanalytical therapy sessions that pierce through him, moments of writing where he hovers in these novels around elements of his history and what he calls "his grief". The importance of his loved ones and his shrink is underlined. He also evokes the possibility of pleasure at the moment of abuse. Finally, this is the book of a mature man who rises to the surface of amnesia to breathe, free himself from his history and come to the aid of the child he once was. A tale of incest for men, lucid about the consequences of incest despite silence and the desire to forget. Eventually, somatization shows him the way to memory. His work, however, offers clues in spite of himself, through the darker sides he expresses in it. A powerful book of recognition and rebirth.
- Book
