Memoir that shook France recalls living a “perverse nightmare”
It’s a peculiar thing about critics. We praise fiction by saying it has the ring of truth, and nonfiction by saying it has the feel of a novel. And some of us hold entire classes of books in such dim regard that individual works must shake off the stench of their very type — “transcend the genre” is the critic’s finicky little phrase.
Among the most suspect genres is the “abuse memoir.” Chief charges include that these books are “just” documents of trauma. They possess no real literary value, they hew dismayingly to certain conventions, they are repetitive — in effect, they wallow. In her book on campus date rape, “The Morning After,” Katie Roiphe complained that the spoken testimonies of survivors of assault “sound the same” — never mind that the commonalities might make a horrifying point of their own.
“Consent,” by Vanessa Springora and translated by Natasha Lehrer, was published in France last year. It was a sensation, selling 200,000 copies. It is nonfiction that, yes, has thefeelofafable,amemoir of abuse that has been lavishly praised for transcending its type — even as it affirms the genre’s inherent power, rebuking received notions about sex and narrative.
In an interview with The New Yorker, Springora said she conceived of her book as “a message in a bottle.” Don’t imagine a lonely bottle, bobbing in the sea, bearing its plaintive missive. “Consent” is a Molotov cocktail, flung at the face of the French establishment, a work of dazzling, highly controlled fury.
Some 30 years ago, Springora was a 13-yearold tagging along with her mother to a party. A man stared at her. “When I finally dared to turn toward him, he threw me a smile, which I confused for a paternal smile, because it was the smile of a man, and I no longer had a father.”
She refers to him as G.M. In France he was instantly recognizable as Gabriel Matzneff, the acclaimed writer whose sexual predilections for young girls and even younger boys were well known and regarded with fond indulgence. Matzneff wrote in his diaries, published in 1985: “Sometimes, I’ll have as many as four boys — from 8 to 14 years old — in my bed at the same time, and I’ll engage in the most exquisite lovemaking with them.” François Mitterrand declared the author a “hedonist inspiration.”
G.M. began sending her letters, sometimes twice a day. She’d felt herself invisible, if not repulsive, but now, “overnight I had turned into a goddess.” The relationship felt fated. The novel she carried with her at the party, their first meeting, was Balzac’s “Eugénie Grandet.” Only later did she notice its play on words. It named the very role she was soon to play: l’ingénue grandit — “the innocent grows up.” When she went to a bookstore to buy one of G.M.’s books, she discovered “another unsettling coincidence”: The first sentence of the book contained her exact date of birth.
That feeling of fatedness is reinscribed by Springora the shaper of this tale, who begins the book with references to fairy tales, imagining Snow White refusing the temptation of the shiny red apple, Sleeping Beauty resisting the spindle — impossible, the tacit message. Impossible, too, to contemplate that hungry 14-year-old girl rebuffing
G.M. She followed him up the stairs to his sixthfloor flat, with painful docility.
In France, sexual relations between adults and minors under the age of 15 are illegal, but there is no set age of consent, which permits a lighter penalty than rape. Springora asks us what this consent is supposed to look like. What did her teenage self think she was consenting to? How did the experience of adult violence, control and manipulation shape her desires?
The first time they had sex, G.M. could not penetrate her. He sodomized her instead — “just like a little boy,” he told her. “I was in love,” she writes. “I felt adored as never before.”
The notion of “double vision” is a challenge of writing any memoir — to truthfully embody both the perspective of the past and of the narrator in the present. It is at the dramatic center of narratives of abuse; what proves painfully difficult isn’t necessarily confronting what the body had to endure but the story one concocted to survive, that story so often one of being special and chosen, of being adventurous, of consenting.
“It was the most perverse nightmare,” Springora recalls.
Springora stopped seeing G.M. after two years, but he wrote about her obsessively — “at a rhythm that left me no respite.” He wrote novels and published his diaries that included their letters to each other, accounts of the breakup. This dispossession, this theft, prompted “Consent.”
The fallout has been swift. After the publication of “Consent,” prosecutors opened a case against Matzneff. He was dropped by his three publishers and stripped of a lifetime stipend. This week the government announced it would instate 15 as the age of consent. By every conceivable metric, Springora’s book is a triumph.