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A Hymn to Life: Shame Has to Change Sides
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About This Book
The sexual assault that stunned the world. A courageous woman's rallying call for shame to "change sides." For the very first time, Gisèle Pelicot tells her story. In 2024, Gisèle Pelicot waived her right to anonymity in her legal fight against her ex-husband and the fifty men accused of sexually assaulting her, a courageous decision that inspired millions of people around the world. Only four years prior, Gisèle had made the shattering discovery that her partner, Dominique Pelicot, had been secretly drugging and raping her, and inviting strangers to also abuse her in their home for nearly a decade. "Shame must change sides," Gisèle bravely declared at the opening of the trial in Avignon, France, and the dictum soon became an international rallying cry to radically transform public sentiment and legislation surrounding cases of sexual violence. By the time Dominique and the dozens of men accused were found guilty three and a half months later, Gisèle had become a global figure, and her message—that she and other victims of sexual abuse have no reason to feel ashamed—galvanized a movement that triggered protests and demonstrations around the world. In A Hymn to Life, Gisèle tells her story for the very first time, not as victim, but as witness. Beginning in 2020, when she received the first phone call from a local police station, Gisèle recounts the fateful investigation that turned her life inside out. With unwavering honesty and devastating grace, she retraces the steps of a life built over the course of five decades, the final decade of her marriage and its hidden abuse, and the long path of emotional healing that ensues. As Gisèle transcends the unfathomable traumas of her past, against all odds, she emerges with a renewed sense of passion and reverence for her life. Part memoir, part act of defiance, A Hymn to Life is a moving story of survival, testimony, and courage, and an unforgettable portrait of a woman who broke her silence, reclaimed her voice, and forced a reckoning.
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Reviews
"A heartrending and courageous account of the ultimate betrayal."
"A lyrical book about monstrous events, a compelling exploration of what it feels like to hold two existences in your brain at once."
"An astonishing book—unflinchingly honest, open to self-interrogation, evocative, determined ..."
"Alive with the kind of detail that wouldn't look out of place in a good novel, but it's the expression it gives to something glimpsed at during the trial that makes it so singular; namely, the transformation of Gisèle Pelicot from a self-avowedly ordinary woman, 'content with my little life', into a figure of astonishing power."
"To insist that Pelicot's crimes do not erase the life she built in spite of him."
"It was probably necessary that Gisèle Pelicot should have had a ghost-writer but you wonder what she would have revealed left to herself ..."
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