Vanessa Springora

Vanessa Springora never anticipated the impact her memoir would have, said Rosie Kinchen in The Times (U.K.). Consent, published in France early last year, describes how a French literary celebrity initiated a sexual relationship with her when he was 50 and she was 14. The book “triggered a cultural reckoning akin to the #MeToo movement,” awakening multiple institutions to their failure to police pedophilia, especially among male artists like Springora’s abuser, Gabriel Matzneff. Matzneff had garnered prestigious awards for years after he wrote about the relationship—referring to Springora as “little V”—and also about engaging in sex with 8-year-old boys in Manila. Consent is not a simple tellall, though. “I try to remind people,” says Springora, who now runs a publishing house in Paris, “that this is first and foremost a piece of literature.”

Springora could not be more right about that, said Lauren Collins in The New Yorker. In Consent, which has just been published in the U.S., her sentences “gleam like metal” and each chapter “snaps shut with the clean brutality of a latch.” She succeeds so brilliantly in her stated goal of “ensnaring the hunter in his own trap” that it’s painful to think of how many other books she might have produced by now had her early passion for writing not been extinguished by the overbearing Matzneff. With Consent, she reclaims her voice, which Matzneff had stolen by integrating her teenage letters into his own books. The runaway popularity of Consent has been a happy byproduct of her artistic triumph. “I think that my book arrived at the right moment,” she says.

“Five years ago, it probably would have been buried.”