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WORK TITLE: Based on a True Story
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S): Delvig, Lou; Vigan, Delphine de
BIRTHDATE: Mar-66
WEBSITE:
CITY:
STATE:
COUNTRY: France
NATIONALITY: French
Winner of France’s Prix de Libraires; http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/no-and-me-by-delphine-de-vigan-1909511.html http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/bookreviews/7568384/No-and-Me-by-Delphine-de-Vigan-review.html http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/fiction/article7049599.ece * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delphine_de_Vigan * https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/apr/30/based-on-a-true-story-delphine-de-vigan-observer-review * http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/books/based-on-a-true-story-review-delphine-de-vigans-thriller-raises-many-questions-20170725-gxi1h4.html
RESEARCHER NOTES:
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| HEADING: | Vigan, Delphine de |
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| 670 | __ |a Vigan, Delphine de. Les jolis garçons, 2004: |b t.p. (Delphine de Vigan) p. 4 of cover (published her first novel under the name Lou Delvig) |
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PERSONAL
Born March, 1966; partner of François Busnel; children: one daughter, one son.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer.
AWARDS:Prix des Libraires, 2008, for No and Me; Prix du Roman FNAC, Prix Roman France Télévisions, and Prix Renault des Lycéens, all for Nothing Holds Back the Night.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
Delphine de Vigan is a French writer, who is based in Paris. She has written books that have won French literary awards.
No and Me
No and Me is the first of de Vigan’s novels to be translated into English. It received the Prix des Libraires in 2008. The volume tells the story of an unlikely friendship between two teens, Lou and No. No is homeless, and Lou is dealing with her mother’s depression after having lost a child.
A contributor to Kirkus Reviews suggested: “In a realistic ending … this quiet yet gripping translation proves its merit.” Sue Roe, reviewer in School Librarian, commented: “It employs a light tone and an endearing narrator to consider dark issues of grief, loss, mental illness, homelessness … and barriers to change and to mingle tragedy and hope in a moving and thoughtprovoking novel for young adults.” “The book is well-written, instantly absorbing, sometimes funny, the characters are complex and engaging and the tension well sustained,” asserted Joy Steward in Reading Time. School Library Journal writer, Jennifer Rothschild, noted: “The directness of Lou’s narration … gives it a spare quality, resulting in a profound and haunting book.” Daniel Hahn, contributor to the London Independent website, stated: “Well-structured, with moments of tenderness and truth about family and home, inadequate parents and neglected children, No and Me is honest (as revealing and insightful about Lou and home life as it is about No and homelessness) but also at least partially reassuring.” In a review of the novel on the Bookbag website, Jill Murphy suggested: “It never loses sight of the social and moral issues it explores and, as it juxtaposes a lonely home with homelessness, it lifts itself into one of those singular books that absolutely anybody can read and be touched by. A great deal of rot is talked about crossover fiction that can be read by child and adult alike, but this truly is a genuine example.”
Underground Time
In Underground Time, de Vigan focuses on two characters’ struggles with work and their personal lives. The characters are a single mother named Mathilde and an emergency doctor named Thibault.
“This masterly author … throws a curveball that all sophisticated readers will want to catch,” asserted Beth E. Andersen in Library Journal. A Kirkus Reviews critic commented: “This is ultimately a corporate horror story—often claustrophobic to the point of oppressive, but undeniably disturbing.” Carol Gladstein, reviewer in Booklist, suggested: “Despite an unexpected conclusion that may throw some readers off, this is an engrossing, well-paced story.” Writing in the London Guardian, Nicola Barr described Underground Time as an “elegantly constructed, sympathetic, compelling, enjoyable novel.” Eileen Battersby, contributor to the Irish Times website, noted: “de Vigan’s view of backstabbing corporate politics will amuse and chill. Her boldly intuitive novel may not quite engage, but it does convince and often succeeds, most certainly when describing the helpless fury of Mathilde and the wary detachment of her gutless colleagues. It is too real for comfort.” “Underground Time has the germ of a good novel in it, but unfortunately that germ didn’t quite develop the way it might have. Read it for Mathilde’s extraordinary poise under pressure; skip the rest,” wrote Allison Slegenthaler on the Postgraduate Contemporary Women’s Writing Network website.
Nothing Holds Back the Night
Nothing Holds Back the Night: A Novel is a fictionalized retelling of de Vigan’s mother’s life. The protagonist, Lucille, deals with mental illness throughout her life and ultimately commits suicide at age sixty-one.
A Publishers Weekly reviewer described Nothing Holds Back the Night as “a striking personal journey.” Leah Strauss, critic in Booklist, called it a “gripping exploration into her mother’s troubled life.” “Sympathy and sadness infuse this compelling investigation in which the author herself plays a difficult role,” commented a writer in Kirkus Reviews. Evelyn Beck, contributor to Library Journal, asserted: “The author’s deep love, rage, frustration, and grief are moving and palpable.” Writing in the London Guardian, Ursula Le Guin, an award-winning novelist herself, remarked: “Whether or not De Vigan is identical with the author-character, her portrait of the mother, Lucile, as an elusive girl who becomes a deeply troubled woman, is compassionate and powerful.” Le Guin added: “Her book is what her delicate and mysterious metaphor promises—a beautiful paper coffin, inscribed with words chosen with painful care and tenderness.” Nancy Kline, reviewer on the New York Times website, asserted: “Although language must inevitably fail to capture her full complexity, de Vigan’s mysterious mother does flash into life in this ‘novel,’ which, despite its darkness, is shot through with light. Perhaps what’s most amazing is that, repeatedly, in the midst of tragedy, its author suddenly thrusts us into the noisy, crazy, generous heart of her mother’s.” A contributor to the Dublin Literary Award website opined: “This harrowing inquiry in to the heart of the familial memory reveals brighter memories as much as hidden secrets. Fascinating and very sensitive.”
Based on a True Story
De Vigan uses her own first name for one of the protagonists of Based on a True Story. Delphine, a writer unnerved by her recent success, strikes up a friendship with a woman called L. As Delphine confides in L. about her family and her writers’ block, L. become increasingly manipulative.
Strauss, the critic in Booklist, called Based on a True Story “a haunting, provoking tale that grows in intensity as the truth Delphine seeks becomes harder to find.” “The insidious nature of a complex mind game masquerading as friendship is chilling to watch unfold,” asserted a Publishers Weekly writer. Reviewing the book on the London Guardian website, Joanna Briscoe noted that it featured “a deeply personal voice with a narrow focus that feels all-consuming. Lou is the very real, flawed, sympathetic person who gets to tell this story, but No is always very much there. She may be in the background but her actions—both on and off-stage—are a huge presence in the novel.” A contributor to the Better Reading website remarked: “This is an enchanting story that weaves itself in your mind, slowly at first, until you begin to feel just as trapped by L. as Delphine does. It is cerebral, claustrophobic, and rattling. Although on the surface it’s a novel about psychological obsession and loss, it is ultimately shrouded by a mystery that shudders to the core.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, August 1, 2010, Gillian Engberg, review of No and Me, p. 49; November 1, 2011, Carol Gladstein, review of Underground Time, p. 23; March 1, 2014, Leah Strauss, review of Nothing Holds Back the Night: A Novel, p. 19; May 1, 2017, Leah Strauss, review of Based on a True Story, p. 55.
Horn Book Guide, spring, 2011, Hannah Rodgers Barnaby, review of No and Me, p. 96.
Kirkus Reviews, July 1, 2010, review of No and Me; November 1, 2011, review of Underground Time; December 15, 2013, review of Nothing Holds Back the Night.
Library Journal, August 1, 2011, Beth E. Andersen, review of Underground Time, p. 89; January 1, 2014, Evelyn Beck, review of Nothing Holds Back the Night, p. 94.
London Guardian, May 14, 2011, Nicola Barr, review of Underground Time, p. 14; November 23, 2013, Ursula le Guin, review of Nothing Holds Back the Night, p. 11.
London Observer, March 14, 2010, Hermione Ho, review of No and Me.
Publishers Weekly, September 19, 2011, review of Underground Time, p. 33; November 4, 2013, review of Nothing Holds Back the Night, p. 42; March 27, 2017, review of Based on a True Story, p. 82.
Reading Time, August, 2010, Joy Steward, review of No and Me, p. 34.
School Librarian, summer, 2010, Sue Roe, review of No and Me, p. 109; spring, 2011, Anna Griffin, review of No and Me, p. 50.
School Library Journal, July, 2010, Jennifer Rothschild, review of No and Me, p. 86.
ONLINE
Abu Dhabi National Online, https://www.thenational.ae/ (February 12, 2018), Matthew Adams, review of Based on a True Story.
Better Reading, http://www.betterreading.com.au/ (May 15, 2017), review of Based on a True Story.
Bloomsbury Website, https://www.bloomsbury.com/ (February 12, 2018), author profile.
Bookbag, http://www.thebookbag.co.uk/ (March 1, 2010), Jill Murphy, review of No and Me.
Criminal Element, https://www.criminalelement.com/ (May 8, 2017), Deborah Lacy, review of Based on a True Story.
Dublin Literary Award Website, http://www.dublinliteraryaward.ie/ (February 12, 2018), review of Underground Time; (February 12, 2018), review of Nothing Holds Back the Night.
Financial Times Online, https://www.ft.com/ (April 13, 2017), Barry Forshaw, review of Based on a True Story.
Fresh Fiction, http://freshfiction.com/ (February 12, 2018), author profile.
Irish Times Online, https://www.irishtimes.com/ (October 17, 2013), Eileen Battersby, review of Underground Time.
London Evening Standard Online, https://www.standard.co.uk/ (March 23, 2017), Jane Shilling, review of Based on a True Story.
London Guardian Online, https://www.theguardian.com/ (April 15, 2017), Joanna Briscoe, review of Based on a True Story.
London Independent Online, http://www.independent.co.uk/ (February 28, 2010), Daniel Hahn, review of No and Me; (June 30, 2011), Emma Hagestadt, review of Underground Time; (March 11, 2012), David Evans, review of Underground Time; (March 29, 2017), Lucy Scholes, review of Based on a True Story.
London Telegraph Online, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/ (March 25, 2017), Celia Walden, author interview and review of Based on a True Story.
New York Times Online, https://www.nytimes.com/ (May 11, 2014), Nancy Kline, review of Nothing Holds Back the Night.
Postgraduate Contemporary Women’s Writing Network Website, https://pgcwwn.org/ (October 18, 2013), Allison Slegenthaler, review of Underground Time.
Readventurer, http://www.thereadventurer.com/ (October 22, 2012), review of No and Me.
Rumpus, http://therumpus.net/ (June 1, 2017), Rebecca Schuh, review of Based on a True Story.
Scotsman Online, https://www.scotsman.com/ (March 20, 2010), review of No and Me.
Scottish Daily Record, https://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/ (November 11, 2013), Gregor White, review of No and Me.
Delphine de Vigan is French and lives in Paris. She has published several novels for adults. No and Me was awarded the Prix des Libraires 2008 (The Booksellers' Prize) in France.
Writes: General Fiction, Fiction
Author of : Based on a True Story, Nothing Holds Back the Night, Underground Time, No and Me
Delphine De Vigan
Delphine de Vigan is the author of several novels, three of them available in English: No and Me, awarded the 2008 Prix des Libraires (Bookseller’s Prize); Underground Time, shortlisted for the 2009 Prix Goncourt; and Nothing Holds Back the Night, awarded the Prix du roman Fnac, the Prix Roman France Télévisions, and the Prix Renaudot des Lycéens. De Vigan lives in Paris.
Series
Books:
Based on a True Story, May 2017
Hardcover
QUOTED: "This masterly author ... throws a curveball that all sophisticated readers will want to catch."
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Print Marked Items
Vigan, Delphine de. Underground Time
Beth E. Andersen
Library Journal.
136.13 (Aug. 1, 2011): p89. From Book Review Index Plus.
COPYRIGHT 2011 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
Full Text:
Vigan, Delphine de. Underground Time. Bloomsbury, dist. by Macmillan. Dec. 2011. c.272p, tr. from French by George Miller. ISBN 9781608197125. pap. $15. F
Mathilde and Thibault, strangers to each other, experience deep misery as they navigate the soul- sucking crush of daily life in Paris. After a long run as a talented marketing executive, Mathilde, a 40-year-old widow with three young sons, is systematically being destroyed by her boss (and former mentor), whose bullying escalates as the weeks go by. Thibault, a traveling paramedic who has just dumped his emotionless lover, finds no solace as he battles traffic congestion to visit the homes of invisible citizens who have fallen off society's radar. De Vigan's gift for unvarnished and beautifully described angst builds unbearably as the two characters cling to hope and sanity, believing that their salvation can only come in the form of a perfect lover. VERDICT De Vigan romanticizes absolutely nothing in this sharply observed study of the suffocating trap of urban hopelessness. She shows no mercy to her readers, who will find themselves gritting their teeth and hoping that Mathilde's and Thibault's bottomless suffering will be cured by the too-oft- used magical meet-up and happy ending. Instead, this masterly author, winner of France's 2008 Prix des Libraires for No and Me, throws a curveball that all sophisticated readers will want to catch. [See Prepub Alert, 5/23/11.]--Beth E. Andersen, Ann Arbor Dist. Lib., MI
Andersen, Beth E.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Andersen, Beth E. "Vigan, Delphine de. Underground Time." Library Journal, 1 Aug. 2011, p.
89. PowerSearch, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A263879320/GPS?u=schlager& sid=GPS&xid=0825dd4e. Accessed 26 Jan. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A263879320
QUOTED: "This is ultimately a corporate horror story—often claustrophobic to the point of oppressive, but undeniably disturbing."
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de Vigan, Delphine: UNDERGROUND TIME
Kirkus Reviews.
(Nov. 1, 2011): From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2011 Kirkus Media LLC http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
de Vigan, Delphine UNDERGROUND TIME Bloomsbury (Adult Fiction) $15.00 12, 1 ISBN: 978-1-60819-712-5
A prizewinner and bestseller in France, de Vigan (No and Me, 2010, etc.) is a master of the spare (and of despair) in this brief novel about two unhappy Parisians who may or may not be destined to meet. The novel takes place during a single day, May 20, when a psychic has told widowed mother of three Mathilde that she will meet a man. Although her corporate job has become a nightmare since her supervisor Jacques turned against her months earlier after she mildly disagreed with him in front of others, Mathilde starts the day excited that something new is going to happen. She even laughs with her children, a moment that becomes more poignant in memory as her day falls apart. Meanwhile, elsewhere in Paris, Thibault, who has given up a safe suburban GP practice to be a traveling emergency doctor (his job does not quite translate in the U.S.), starts the day by breaking up with his unloving girlfriend, then makes his medical service calls in a mood that swings between rage and despair. When a woman falls at the metro station Mathilde helps her. Thibault is called but arrives just after Mathilde has left. Late getting to work, Mathilde discovers Jacques has moved her out of her office into a humiliating spot near the men's room and has stripped her of all of her responsibilities. She and Jacques both know she cannot be fired, but he continues to ratchet up his campaign to make her work life increasingly miserable to the point of unbearable. As Mathilde wanders through the Kafkaesque corporate labyrinth, trying to find an escape from Jacque's reach, Thibault drives the city streets overwhelmed by an exhausting caseload of patients whose lives have shriveled into hopelessness. Will these two ever meet? You'll have to read the book to find out. This is ultimately a corporate horror story--often claustrophobic to the point of oppressive, but undeniably disturbing.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"de Vigan, Delphine: UNDERGROUND TIME." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Nov. 2011. PowerSearch,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A271533021/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=257b16dd. Accessed 26 Jan. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A271533021
QUOTED: "In a realistic ending ... this quiet yet gripping translation proves its merit."
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de Vigan, Delphine: NO AND ME
Kirkus Reviews.
(July 1, 2010): From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2010 Kirkus Media LLC http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
de Vigan, Delphine NO AND ME Bloomsbury (Adult Fiction) $16.99 8, 1 ISBN: 978-1-59990-479-5
Although deemed "intellectually precocious" and placed ahead two grades, 13-year-old Parisian Lou Bertignac lacks the words and confidence to fit in with her older and more physically mature classmates, to cope with her depressed mother, who had a breakdown after losing Lou's infant sister, and to connect with Lucas, a fellow loner who was held back two grades but isn't afraid of life or authority. Then Lou meets homeless girl No. Using the excuse of research for a class presentation, Lou interviews No, and not only does she learn about the harsh conditions of homelessness but she finds her voice to tell her own story as well. Her thought-provoking and often poetic musings about No's life ("Are we so small, so very small, that the world continues to turn, immensely large, and couldn't care less where we sleep?") challenge readers to rethink their responsibilities to humankind. In a realistic ending that is at once heartening and heartrending, Lou also discovers that saving No is harder than she ever imagined. Winner of France's Prix des Libraires, this quiet yet gripping translation proves its merit. (Fiction. YA)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"de Vigan, Delphine: NO AND ME." Kirkus Reviews, 1 July 2010. PowerSearch,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A256560416/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=40b55d52. Accessed 26 Jan. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A256560416
QUOTED: "a striking personal journey."
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Nothing Holds Back the Night
Publishers Weekly.
260.44 (Nov. 4, 2013): p42. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2013 PWxyz, LLC http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Nothing Holds Back the Night
Delphine De Vigan, trans, from the French by George Miller. Bloomsbury, $16 (352p)ISBN 978-1-62040-485-0
De Vigan's latest novel (following Underground Time) is a fervent, autobiographical examination of the volatile life of her mother, Lucile, who committed suicide in 2008. "Every day that passes I see how difficult it is to write about my mother, to define her in words, how much her voice is missing." Writing about Lucile after her suicide is a daunting task, but De Vigan feels compelled to tackle it, hoping to identify the catalyst of her mother's enduring torment. Lucile rises up from the page, aided by testimony from relatives, recordings, photographs, and her daughter's memories. Born into a large clan, Lucile's beauty is so arresting that, as a child, she becomes a model. Yet she encounters devastating loss at a young age with the death of one of her brothers, Antonin, leading to a later stint in a psychiatric hospital. Lucile becomes pregnant with Delphine at age 18, marries the father, Gabriel, and attempts to be a conventional mother. At age 26, however, she divorces Gabriel and embraces a peripatetic existence. As De Vigan contemplates her mother's troubled life, she overcomes finds the fortitude to her trepidation and continue writing, making for a striking personal journey. (Mar.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Nothing Holds Back the Night." Publishers Weekly, 4 Nov. 2013, p. 42. PowerSearch,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A351435217/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=f8771734. Accessed 26 Jan. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A351435217
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Underground Time
Publishers Weekly.
258.38 (Sept. 19, 2011): p33. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2011 PWxyz, LLC http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Underground Time
Delphine de Vigan. Bloomsbury, $15 trade paper (272p) ISBN 978-1-60819-712-5
De Vigan (No and Me) pursues two doomed characters in their Parisian isolation with her second novel, but treats them with more coldness than empathy. When a clairvoyant predicts that her life will change "on the twentieth of May," Mathilde, once her boss's right-hand woman, is steadily relieved of her responsibilities and ostracized at work after having what she thought was a polite disagreement in a business meeting. While Mathilde desperately hopes for an explanation for this banishment, she stubbornly clings to the job that supports her and her three children. Meanwhile, young EMT Thibault contemplates the emptiness of his life as he drives his emergency medical rounds. Thibault separated from his latest girlfriend because he felt no connection to her and left a thriving country practice (losing his dream of becoming a surgeon), but now questions why he wanted to come to Paris in the first place. De Vigan moves these two lost souls around their metro, boulot, dodo days, from arrondissements to numbing office corridors, as they lose themselves further and further in moody self-reflection, a tenor that de Vigan holds but doesn't escalate, until a vague conclusion confirms that her characters are more philosophical construct than flesh and blood. (Dec.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Underground Time." Publishers Weekly, 19 Sept. 2011, p. 33. PowerSearch,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A267710091/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=f4407ec6. Accessed 26 Jan. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A267710091
QUOTED: "Despite an unexpected conclusion that may throw some readers off, this is an engrossing, well-paced story."
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Underground Time
Carol Gladstein
Booklist.
108.5 (Nov. 1, 2011): p23+. From Book Review Index Plus.
COPYRIGHT 2011 American Library Association http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
Full Text:
Underground Time.
By Delphine de Vigan. Tr. by George Miller. Dec. 2011. 272p. Bloomsbury, paper, $15 (9781608197125).
Mathilde, 40, is a single mother of three working in Paris at a large multinational company. For the past eight years, her job has provided her with a deep sense of satisfaction. That all changes when she contradicts her boss during an important presentation. Her once happy work life vanishes as he systematically sets out to destroy her reputation. Meanwhile, Thibault, 40, works as an emergency doctor, navigating Parisian traffic to make house calls while pondering his recent breakup with an emotionally absent girlfriend. Underground Time, shortlisted for the Prix Goncourt, examines one day in Mathilde's and Thibault's lives as they negotiate the demands of stressful jobs and endure the loneliness of living in a metropolis. De Vigan has beautifully captured the behind-the-scenes agendas of personal and professional lives: the monotonous daily commute, the fragile work relationships, and the many shades of on-the-job violence. Despite an unexpected conclusion that may throw some readers off, this is an engrossing, well-paced story that takes us into a world most of us know but rarely discuss.--Carol Gladstein
Gladstein, Carol
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Gladstein, Carol. "Underground Time." Booklist, 1 Nov. 2011, p. 23+. PowerSearch,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A272445110/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=96588232. Accessed 26 Jan. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A272445110
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No and Me
Gillian Engberg
Booklist.
106.22 (Aug. 1, 2010): p49. From Book Review Index Plus.
COPYRIGHT 2010 American Library Association http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
Full Text:
No and Me.
By Delphine de Vigan. Tr. by George Miller.
Aug. 2010. 256p. Bloomsbury, $16.99 (9781599904795). Gr. 8-11.
Winner of the 2008 Prix de Libraries (Booksellers' Prize), this moving French import begins when 13-year-old Lou, a ferociously shy and intelligent Parisian, declares an unusual class project: "I'm going to follow the journey of a homeless girl." Her teacher's enthusiasm forces Lou to follow her idea through, and in a train station she meets 18-year-old No. Lou feels like an outsider even at home, where "sadness clings to the walls" after her baby sister's sudden death and her mother's subsequent breakdown. With No she finds a surprising, true friendship, and she convinces her parents to allow No to move in. Writing in Lou's strong, convincing voice, de Vigan poses the largest existential questions about meaning, purpose, and the possibilities and limits of saving another life. Subtle, authentic details; memorable characters (including Lou's older friend, Lucas); and realistic ambiguities in each scene ground the story's weighty themes, and teens will easily recognize Lou's fragile shifts between heartbreak, bitter disillusionment, and quiet, miraculous hope.--Gillian Engberg
Engberg, Gillian
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Engberg, Gillian. "No and Me." Booklist, 1 Aug. 2010, p. 49. PowerSearch,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A234788744/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=a4a8fbd6. Accessed 26 Jan. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A234788744
QUOTED: "Sympathy and sadness infuse this compelling investigation in which the author herself plays a difficult role."
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de Vigan, Delphine: NOTHING HOLDS BACK THE NIGHT
Kirkus Reviews.
(Dec. 15, 2013): From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2013 Kirkus Media LLC http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
de Vigan, Delphine NOTHING HOLDS BACK THE NIGHT Bloomsbury (Adult Fiction) $17.00 3, 25 ISBN: 978-1-62040-485-0
Prompted by her mother's suicide, a French author delicately combines memoir, biography and fiction to explore her family's increasingly dark psychology. The book has sold an estimated half a million copies in France. Initially, after de Vigan (Underground Time, 2011, etc.) discovered the corpse of her mother, Lucile Poirier, she resisted the idea of writing about her but eventually felt she had no choice. Drawing on the testimonies of family members, as well as letters, photos and home movies, she assembled this disturbing account of her sensitive mother's life growing up in a large, affectionate, but complex family in post-World War II France. Unusually beautiful, Lucile was a successful child model and star, but her fame fed a desperate wish for invisibility and peace, neither of which were often available in a home with eight siblings. An initially sunny family portrait slowly darkens after an accidental drowning, an asphyxiation, then suicides and suggestions of incest. Pregnant at 18, Lucile marries the baby's father and gives birth to Delphine, then has a second child, but the marriage only lasts eight years. Delphine, growing up aware of her mother's fragility, must cope when Lucile's mental health finally collapses. Constantly trying to separate truth from fable and family myth, the author treads carefully, conscious of sensitivities and her own uncertainties, while tracing events to their tragically preordained conclusion. Sympathy and sadness infuse this compelling investigation in which the author herself plays a difficult role.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"de Vigan, Delphine: NOTHING HOLDS BACK THE NIGHT." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Dec. 2013.
PowerSearch, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A352605642/GPS?u=schlager& sid=GPS&xid=705d7681. Accessed 26 Jan. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A352605642
QUOTED: "The author's deep love, rage, frustration, and grief are moving and palpable."
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de Vigan, Delphine. Nothing Holds
Back the Night
Evelyn Beck
Library Journal.
139.1 (Jan. 1, 2014): p94. From Book Review Index Plus.
COPYRIGHT 2014 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
Full Text:
* de Vigan, Delphine. Nothing Holds Back the Night. Bloomsbury USA. Mar. 2014. 352p. tr. from French by George Miller. ISBN 9781620404850. pap. $16. F
Though billed as a novel, this book is very much a memoir. As the author seeks to come to terms with her mother Lucile's suicide, she interviews relatives in order to imagine Lucile's childhood in a large family touched by tragedies--the deaths of two siblings, another born with Down syndrome, and possible sexual abuse by their father. This part of the story is the most novelistic, though it is occasionally interrupted by reflections on the process of uncovering and interpreting information, creating a kind of detective story. Then the focus shifts to Lucile's struggle with mental illness, her hospitalization and its effects, and especially her inability to care for her two daughters. Lucile emerges as a fascinatingly complex woman struggling to conquer her demons and even finding success for long periods but ultimately succumbing to despair in the face of physical illness. The author's deep love, rage, frustration, and grief are moving and palpable. VERDICT Recommended for fans of memoirs looking to understand family mental illness, such as Kathleen Finneran's The Tender Land.--Evelyn Beck, Piedmont Technical Coll., Greenwood, SC
Beck, Evelyn
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Beck, Evelyn. "de Vigan, Delphine. Nothing Holds Back the Night." Library Journal, 1 Jan.
2014, p. 94. PowerSearch, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A355150597 /GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=8879f36c. Accessed 26 Jan. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A355150597
QUOTED: "a haunting, provoking tale that grows in intensity as the truth Delphine seeks becomes harder to find."
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Based on a True Story
Leah Strauss
Booklist.
113.17 (May 1, 2017): p55. From Book Review Index Plus.
COPYRIGHT 2017 American Library Association http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
Full Text:
Based on a True Story. By Delphine de Vigan. Tr. by George Miller. May 2017. 384p. Bloomsbury, $26 (9781632868152).
Writer Delphine finds herself unprepared for the tremendous popularity of her latest book. It's brought the unwavering support of her fans, along with the ire of others, particularly the anonymous author of unsettling letters. At a party one evening, a weary Delphine meets L., a fellow writer, and the two immediately connect. Soon Delphine and L. are seeing each other constantly, and Delphine is quick to shrug off some of L.'s idiosyncrasies--she never visits when Delphine's children are present, for instance, and she seems to always be in the right place at the right time. Soon Delphine is under pressure to begin her next book, and her anxiety becomes paralyzing. L. takes it upon herself to help Delphine and becomes more and more involved with both her life and her writing. Before long, L.'s influence--which spans years--causes Delphine to question her innermost thoughts, abilities, and realities. Award-winning and best-selling de Vigan (.Nothing Holds Back the Night, 2014) crafts a haunting, provoking tale that grows in intensity as the truth Delphine seeks becomes harder to find.--Leah Strauss
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Strauss, Leah. "Based on a True Story." Booklist, 1 May 2017, p. 55. PowerSearch,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A495035050/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=504d10f5. Accessed 26 Jan. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A495035050
QUOTED: "gripping exploration into her mother's troubled life."
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Nothing Holds Back the Night
Leah Strauss
Booklist.
110.13 (Mar. 1, 2014): p19. From Book Review Index Plus.
COPYRIGHT 2014 American Library Association http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
Full Text:
Nothing Holds Back the Night. By Delphine de Vigan. Tr. by George Miller. Mar. 2014. 352p. Bloomsbury, paper, $17 (9781620404850).
Award-winning French novelist de Vigan combines memoir with fiction in this gripping exploration into her mother's troubled life. After 61-year-old Lucile commits suicide, de Vigan sets out to tell Lucile's difficult story in an attempt to uncover, and understand, the genesis of her despair. We see Lucile as the third child in a family of 11 raised by unorthodox parents who regard her as an enigma. She becomes a child model, then marries at 18, and soon after gives birth to de Vigan. The marriage doesn't last, and Lucile raises de Vigan and her younger sister as a single mother. Their upbringing is an unconventional one, punctuated by the tormenting effects of Lucile's escalating battle with mental illness, in which periods of calm are followed by profound episodes of darkness. The narrative alternates between Lucile's tale and de Vigan's worries over the damage Lucile's ordeal may cause her living relatives, particularly when disturbing family secrets are revealed. De Vigan's self-doubt is an undercurrent throughout, offering a raw perspective on mental illness and the veil of family myth. --Leah Strauss
Strauss, Leah
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Strauss, Leah. "Nothing Holds Back the Night." Booklist, 1 Mar. 2014, p. 19. PowerSearch,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A362962172/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=ab59e56a. Accessed 26 Jan. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A362962172
QUOTED: "The insidious nature of a complex mind game masquerading as friendship is chilling to watch unfold."
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Based on a True Story
Publishers Weekly.
264.13 (Mar. 27, 2017): p82. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Based on a True Story
Delphine de Vigan, trans, from the French by George Miller. Bloomsbury, $26 (384p) ISBN 978-1-63286-815-2
Delphine, the narrator of this unsettling metafictional tale of obsession and interchangeable identities from de Vigan (Nothing Holds Back the Night), reverts back to her shy, schoolgirl persona after the success of her latest autobiographical novel leaves her feeling overwhelmed. Then she meets the chic, confident L., with whom she immediately strikes up an easy rapport. The friendship develops smoothly, with the two women getting drinks around Paris and learning more about each other. Except L. seems more eager to know everything there is to know about Delphine--all about her two grown children, her relationship with her boyfriend--than share much about herself. Writing is at the center of the relationship: Delphine's inability to put pen to paper, or fingers to keyboard, and L.'s insistence that there's a book Delphine must write. Almost without realizing it, Delphine cedes control to L., with dire consequences. While readers might pick up on L.'s unsavory nature faster than Delphine, the insidious nature of a complex mind game masquerading as friendship is chilling to watch unfold. (May)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Based on a True Story." Publishers Weekly, 27 Mar. 2017, p. 82. PowerSearch,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A487928124/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=eae6fa4b. Accessed 26 Jan. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A487928124
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de Vigan, Delphine: No and Me
Anna Griffin
School Librarian.
59.1 (Spring 2011): p50. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2011 The School Library Association http://www.sla.org.uk/school-librarian.php
Full Text:
de Vigan, Delphine
No and Me
Translated by George Miller
Bloomsbury, 2010, pp246, 6.99 [pounds sterling] 978 0 7475 9983 8
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
This is a very enjoyable book to read as Delphine de Vigan pulls you into the complex, yet addictive narrative of Lou.
No and Me is an interesting and perplexing story of a unique teenage girl who befriends a homeless teenager a little older than herself. It is told from the perspective of a highly intelligent teen, viewing the world in a very naive and innocent way. As the two girls' lives are joined together, the differences between their worlds become increasingly obvious. Both girls use each other to try and escape their own lives. Lou wants to escape the world of mourning that her mother has fallen into, while No simply wants a chance to escape the harsh world of the homeless. No and Meis a fulfilling read that gives a great insight not only into the grimy world of homelessness, but also into a family trying to cope with a death of an infant. This would be a great read for a young teenager curious about other lives.
Griffin, Anna
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Griffin, Anna. "de Vigan, Delphine: No and Me." School Librarian, Spring 2011, p. 50.
PowerSearch, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A252385632/GPS?u=schlager& sid=GPS&xid=8e0e03e1. Accessed 26 Jan. 2018.
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QUOTED: "It employs a light tone and an endearing narrator to consider dark issues of grief, loss, mental illness, homelessness ... and barriers to change and to mingle tragedy and hope in a moving and thoughtprovoking novel for young adults."
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De Vigan, Delphine: No and Me
Sue Roe
School Librarian.
58.2 (Summer 2010): p109. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2010 The School Library Association http://www.sla.org.uk/school-librarian.php
Full Text:
De Vigan, Delphine
No and Me
Translated by George Miller
Bloomsbury, 2010, pp246, 9.99 [pounds sterling] 978 1 4088 0751 4
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
Lou Bertignac is 13 years old with an IQ of 160 and a good friend, Lucas, who helps her to cope with the perplexities of school life amidst a class of students two years older than she is. Lou is both naive and remarkably intelligent. She carries out constant scientific investigations and experiments to try and understand the objects and world around her, but no amount of scientific enquiry can make sense of her desolate home life with a mother who has retreated into silence and isolation after the death of Lou's baby sister and a father who struggles to hold the family together.
When Lou meets No, a homeless 18-year-old girl, at the Gare d'Austerlitz, a friendship begins between them and Lou chooses the plight of the homeless as the subject of her class presentation with No as her interviewee. This choice has spiralling consequences when Lou, no longer able to bear the thought of No returning to the streets each night, persuades her parents to let No live with them. No's presence breaks the isolation and despair of each member of Lou's family and allows them to begin to look outward. But though No's presence has a transforming effect, No herself is too damaged for her life to be so easily transformed in turn and her influence is disruptive as well as positive with hints of alcohol and drug abuse and possible prostitution, which Lou, with her unwavering determination to help, does not see or understand.
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The author resists the temptation of an unconvincing happy ending for No whilst giving one, albeit tinged with sadness, to Lou with an improved family life, a burgeoning relationship with Lucas and the knowledge that she cannot live, or even understand, No's life. There is also hope for the reader in the very character of Lou, whose innocence, kind heart, good intentions and refusal to accept that things cannot be different, make her a powerful narrator.
This translated novel won the Prix des Libraires in France and will be published in adult and Young Adult versions in the UK. It employs a light tone and an endearing narrator to consider dark issues of grief, loss, mental illness, homelessness, social inequalities and barriers to change and to mingle tragedy and hope in a moving and thoughtprovoking novel for young adults.
Sue Roe Roe, Sue
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Roe, Sue. "De Vigan, Delphine: No and Me." School Librarian, Summer 2010, p. 109.
PowerSearch, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A243042633/GPS?u=schlager& sid=GPS&xid=a261bcd1. Accessed 26 Jan. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A243042633
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de Vigan, Delphine: No and Me
Hannah Rodgers Barnaby
The Horn Book Guide.
22.1 (Spring 2011): p96. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2011 The Horn Book, Inc. http://www.hornbookguide.com
Full Text:
de Vigan, Delphine No and Me
244 pp. Bloomsbury ISBN 978-1-59990-479-5 $16.99
(3) Translated by George Miller. Still reeling from the tragic loss of her baby sister, Lou finds herself drawn to No, a homeless girl who soon affects every aspect of Lou's fractured family life. Though Lou and No's friendship takes a dark turn, de Vigan's novel is ultimately a gritty, touching portrait of a girl in crisis and the beginnings of her redemption.
Barnaby, Hannah Rodgers
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Barnaby, Hannah Rodgers. "de Vigan, Delphine: No and Me." The Horn Book Guide, Spring
2011, p. 96. PowerSearch, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A254189190 /GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=6efb0967. Accessed 26 Jan. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A254189190
QUOTED: "The book is well-written, instantly absorbing, sometimes funny, the characters are complex and engaging and the tension well sustained."
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de Vigan, Delphine: No and Me
Joy Steward
Reading Time.
54.3 (Aug. 2010): p34. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2010 Children's Book Council of Australia http://cbca.org.au/merchandiseOrdering/RTsubscribe.php
Full Text:
de VIGAN, Delphine No and Me Bloomsbury, 2010 246pp $22.99 ISBN 9781408807514 SCIS 1453618
Lou Bertignac is 13 with an IQ of 160. Consequently she has been accelerated at school into a class of 15-year-olds. Her best friend at school, Lucas, is 17, creative, charming, compassionate and intelligent, he has been held back because of his lack of commitment and poor academic performance. Out of sync with her peers and classmates both physically and mentally, Lou's interests are wide-ranging--she wants to know everything! Through an investigative class assignment, she meets No, a homeless girl, whom she is unable to forget so manages to persuade her parents to accept No into their home. Lou is a wonderful character, quirky, touchingly innocent, confident and optimistic that her friendship will make a new life possible for No.
Life in the Bertignac household has not been easy since Lou's baby sister died of SIDS some years ago, and her mother's devastating grief caused her to withdraw into depression. Her father's heroic attempts to keep the family functioning is a moving picture of devotion. No's entry into the household does bring change and for a while things go well, but subtly, the reader develops niggling misgivings about No's activities and motives. Lou's devotion to her friend is unswerving even when hope falters, and she is willingly aided by Lucas, the neglected child of affluent parents.
No and Me presents a picture of life in modern Paris from the point of view of a bright adolescent; not the glamorous world of fashion, art and architecture, but a complex of dislocation that raises universal questions about home, family, bureaucracy, grief and mental illness, but most of all about the power of friendship. The book is well-written, instantly absorbing, sometimes funny, the characters are complex and engaging and the tension well sustained. Highly recommended for ages 14 to Adult. JS
Steward, Joy
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Steward, Joy. "de Vigan, Delphine: No and Me." Reading Time, vol. 54, no. 3, 2010, p. 34.
PowerSearch, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A236814851/GPS?u=schlager& sid=GPS&xid=4edd8cdd. Accessed 26 Jan. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A236814851
QUOTED: "The directness of Lou's narration ... gives it a spare quality, resulting in a profound and haunting book."
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De Vigan, Delphine. No and Me
Jennifer Rothschild
School Library Journal.
56.7 (July 2010): p86. From Book Review Index Plus.
COPYRIGHT 2010 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.schoollibraryjournal.com/
Full Text:
DE VIGAN, Delphine. No and Me. tr. from French by George Miller. 256p. CIP. Bloomsbury. Aug. 2010. Tr $16.99. ISBN 978-1-5990-479-5. LC 2009036897.
Gr 9 Up--Lou Bertignac's family has been broken since her infant sister died five years ago. Her severely depressed mother never leaves their Paris apartment, while her father cries in secret and tries to hold the family together. When 13-year-old Lou invites No, a homeless 18-year-old, to move in with them, No's presence starts to draw Lou's mother out, allowing the family to start to heal. Despite Lou's best efforts, however, a place to sleep and people to look after her are not enough to help No. Lou's gifted but socially naive mind constantly analyzes the world around her. People confuse and fascinate her. This character-driven coming-of-age story relies less on plot and more on Lou's changing philosophies as her relationship with No expands her worldview. Although Lou grows considerably, she refuses to let No's frequent betrayals and backslides into self-destructive behavior destroy her optimism. Told in brief scenes interspersed with Lou's questions and findings, this novel explores the intersection and interdependence of lives and how relationships change the people in them and around them. The directness of Lou's narration, coupled with the structure of the novel, gives it a spare quality, resulting in a profound and haunting book.--Jennifer Rothschild, Prince George's County Memorial Library System, Oxon Hill, MD
Rothschild, Jennifer
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Rothschild, Jennifer. "De Vigan, Delphine. No and Me." School Library Journal, July 2010, p.
86. PowerSearch, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A231088459/GPS?u=schlager& sid=GPS&xid=4662124a. Accessed 26 Jan. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A231088459
QUOTED: "Whether or not De Vigan is identical with the author-character, her portrait of the mother, Lucile, as an elusive girl who becomes a deeply troubled woman, is compassionate and powerful."
"Her book is what her delicate and mysterious metaphor promises—a beautiful paper coffin, inscribed with words chosen with painful care and tenderness."
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Review: FICTION: A coffin made of paper: Ursula Le Guin is fascinated by a dark yet luminous memoir: Nothing Holds Back the Night by Delphine de Vigan, translated by George Miller (352pp, Bloomsbury Circus, pounds 12.99)
The Guardian (London, England).
(Nov. 23, 2013): Arts and Entertainment: p11. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2013 Guardian Newspapers. Guardian Newspapers Limited http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguardian
Full Text:
Byline: Ursula Le Guin
The line between fiction and non-fiction can blur into a zone of shadow and uncertainty. What is the "true" story, when memories of it differ widely and all contain great gaps? The difficulty of ever answering Pontius Pilate's question, "What is truth?", leads some writers to treat the difference between factual and fictional accounts as trivial.
People who live under a dictatorship know better. Borges said "All history is fiction," but he didn't say: "All fiction is history." To recognise that all historians invent isn't to say that it doesn't matter if a fiction is called history. Despite the shadow zone of overlap, the distinction is there.
What you call it matters. If you say your story is made up, your fake facts may be of great value as inventions revealing truth. But if you say your made-up story is non-fiction, your faked facts are lies.
Those are rather inflexible rules, and many writers choose to break them. Fiction has always comfortably contained a vast amount of fact and history; now non-fiction is claiming the right to an ever larger proportion of invention. A few memoirists, faking a little too vigorously, have gained a succes de honte, but most semi-factual memoirs are accepted without question. A modern preference for non-fiction may account for the increase in what might be called non- factual non-fiction.
The cover flap of Delphine de Vigan's book calls it a novel. I don't think it is a novel, but I respect the author's honesty in not calling it a memoir. The first part of it, the portrait and history
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of a family, combines apparently factual accounts drawn from interviews and other sources, with long passages of fiction: inventions by the author-character - descriptions of scenes she did not witness, thoughts she imagines in the minds of people alive before she was born.
To me these are the finest part of the book. Because the author-character openly discusses her rights and responsibilities in trying to reconstruct the family in which her mother grew up, there's no moral queasiness, no need to ask "Is that true or are you making it up?" And because her skill and powers of invention are superb, the imagined passages are completely satisfying.
What's more, the material is fascinating in itself: an improbably large French family, remarkable for beauty, vitality, talent, irresponsibility, alienation, and tragedy - absolutely the stuff of novels.
Then, about midway, the book changes tone and subject. Abandoning overt invention, it becomes a more conventional memoir: a daughter's portrait of a fascinating, unstable mother who survived madness at a high cost to herself and both her daughters, and at last killed herself.
Autobiographies and memoirs have made such a subject curiously familiar - less original, and perhaps less valuable, than the attempt to imagine how a family inevitably seen and described as "happy" shaped one of its children to become that unhappy woman.
This is not one of those tiresome books where the "inner child" is allowed to whine about its parent. Whether or not De Vigan is identical with the author-character, her portrait of the mother, Lucile, as an elusive girl who becomes a deeply troubled woman, is compassionate and powerful, as well as painful and shocking. Still, we've been here before. The many memoirs of addiction, senile dementia and insanity run the same risk: extreme pathology devalues personhood, devours the individual. As doctors speak of a patient as "the new cancer in Room 121", a reviewer might feel like saying "the new bipolarity novel . . ."
So what I will remember from Nothing Holds Back the Night is not the last half, written in an increasingly bare, dry style that signals painful factuality, the paragraphs growing shorter till they are almost telegraphic and often banal. I will remember the first half, where the luminous accuracy of the prose reminds me of Colette, where the mixture of reported reminiscence, family legend and empathetic invention is so effective, and where the Poirier family - parents and children - appear in a kind of Renoir sunlight, overflowing with life and vibrant personalities, almost enough to conceal the lurking darkness.
In a passage of self-examination, the author-character writes: "I probably set out to pay homage to Lucile, to give her a coffin made of paper - for these seem the most beautiful of all to me - and a destiny as a character. But I know too that I am using my writing as a way of looking for the origin of her suffering, as though there were a precise moment when the core of her self was breached in a definitive, irreparable way . . ."
Whether that quest can ever be fulfilled, her book is what her delicate and mysterious metaphor promises - a beautiful paper coffin, inscribed with words chosen with painful care and tenderness.
Ursula Le Guin's latest book is Lavinia (Phoenix). To order Nothing Holds Back the Night for pounds 10.39 with free UK p&p call Guardian book service on 0330 333 6846 or go to
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guardianbookshop.co.uk. Ursula Le Guin
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Review: FICTION: A coffin made of paper: Ursula Le Guin is fascinated by a dark yet luminous
memoir: Nothing Holds Back the Night by Delphine de Vigan, translated by George Miller (352pp, Bloomsbury Circus, pounds 12.99)." Guardian [London, England], 23 Nov. 2013, p. 11. PowerSearch, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A350137736/GPS?u=schlager& sid=GPS&xid=62db2885. Accessed 26 Jan. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A350137736
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Observer Review: Critics: Books: 0NE TO WATCH: Delphine de Vigan Writer
The Observer (London, England).
(Mar. 14, 2010): Arts and Entertainment: p47. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2010 Guardian Newspapers. Guardian Newspapers Limited http://www.guardian.co.uk/
Full Text:
Byline: Hermione Ho
De Vignan is a sensation in her native France, where her bestselling novel No et Moi was awarded the Prix des Libraires and was shortlisted for the Goncourt prize. The 44-year-old is set to become a hit this side of the Channel when No and Me is published this month by Bloomsbury in both young adult and adult editions, with differing cover designs. This is the first of her five novels to be published in English (in a translation by George Miller), although it has already been translated into 19 other languages. It tells the story of a ferociously bright 13-year-old, Lou Bertignac, and the older homeless girl called No she meets at the Gare d'Austerlitz in Paris. Their meeting impels Lou to make homelessness the subject of her class presentation and a friendship blossoms until No goes missing. The novel has won favourable comparisons to Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time and Radio 4 has picked it as a forthcoming Book at Bedtime. It's also been adapted for the big screen. Hermione Hoby
Hermione Hoby
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Observer Review: Critics: Books: 0NE TO WATCH: Delphine de Vigan Writer." Observer
[London, England], 14 Mar. 2010, p. 47. PowerSearch, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc /A221276847/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=216445f4. Accessed 26 Jan. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A221276847
QUOTED: "elegantly constructed, sympathetic, compelling, enjoyable novel."
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Review: PAPERBACKS: Fiction: Underground Time, by Delphine de Vigan, translated by George Miller (Bloomsbury, pounds 11.99)
The Guardian (London, England).
(May 14, 2011): Arts and Entertainment: p14. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2011 Guardian Newspapers. Guardian Newspapers Limited http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguardian
Full Text:
Byline: Nicola Barr
Oh, but the French do loneliness and desperation classily. It is why, in Delphine de Vigan's second novel, Mathilde, the 40-year-old widowed mother being bullied out of her job and into depression by her narcissistic boss remains sexy, despite her self-confessed pathetic trip to a clairvoyant because, with "no future tense, no prospect of anything after", "you need something to hang on to". It's why Thibault, the 40-year-old paramedic who has just broken up with the woman he loves because he understands she will never love him, has a swagger, a solidity to him that makes him no victim. It may not be the intention, but these two strangers feel far from lost causes as they crisscross Paris over 24 hours, contemplating their limited options. Yes, in an ideal world fate would bring them together and they would save each other. That it doesn't happen is irksome, to say the least. But as this elegantly constructed, sympathetic, compelling, enjoyable novel draws to a close, you would be hard pressed to think these two are going under.
Nicola Barr
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Review: PAPERBACKS: Fiction: Underground Time, by Delphine de Vigan, translated by
George Miller (Bloomsbury, pounds 11.99)." Guardian [London, England], 14 May 2011, p. 14. PowerSearch, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A256377361/GPS?u=schlager& sid=GPS&xid=7251c736. Accessed 26 Jan. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A256377361
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Underground Time by Delphine de Vigan – review
By Nicola Barr
Nicola Barr
Fri 13 May 2011 19.05 EDT
First published on Fri 13 May 2011 19.05 EDT
Oh, but the French do loneliness and desperation classily. It is why, in Delphine de Vigan's second novel, Mathilde, the 40-year-old widowed mother being bullied out of her job and into depression by her narcissistic boss remains sexy, despite her self-confessed pathetic trip to a clairvoyant because, with "no future tense, no prospect of anything after", "you need something to hang on to". It's why Thibault, the 40-year-old paramedic who has just broken up with the woman he loves because he understands she will never love him, has a swagger, a solidity to him that makes him no victim. It may not be the intention, but these two strangers feel far from lost causes as they crisscross Paris over 24 hours, contemplating their limited options. Yes, in an ideal world fate would bring them together and they would save each other. That it doesn't happen is irksome, to say the least. But as this elegantly constructed, sympathetic, compelling, enjoyable novel draws to a close, you would be hard pressed to think these two are going under.
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QUOTED: "de Vigan’s view of backstabbing corporate politics will amuse and chill. Her boldly intuitive novel may not quite engage, but it does convince and often succeeds, most certainly when describing the helpless fury of Mathilde and the wary detachment of her gutless colleagues. It is too real for comfort."
Underground Time, by Delphine de Vigan, translated by George Miller
This Impac-listed novel about a bullied office worker will strike a chord if you’ve ever been the victim of workplace back-stabbing
Eileen Battersby
Thu, Oct 17, 2013, 12:04
First published:
Sat, Mar 16, 2013, 06:00
Book Title:
Underground Time
ISBN-13:
9781408811115
Author:
Delphine De Vigan
Publisher:
Bloomsbury
Guideline Price:
Sterling11.99
Mathilde is in a crisis. She cannot sleep; if she does, she has nightmares. Her life has become so intolerable that she has already consulted a clairvoyant. The only hope she has left rests on a date: things will change on May 30th, or so she has been told. It is neither illness nor poverty that has reduced her to a nervous shadow of her former self. Her days and nights are dominated by physically incapacitating stress and her increasing dread of going to work.
The French writer Delphine de Vigan caused a deserved sensation with an earlier novel, No and Me (2007). Its success in France and Germany was matched by George Miller ’s English translation, which was published in 2010. The all-too-topical Underground Time , which, as well as having a cult following, features on the 2013 International Impac Dublin Literary Award longlist, will not only put a chill in the hearts of many office workers; it will also be greeted with nods of recognition. This bullying is what can happen in working environments where the most savage law of the jungle applies.
What makes Mathilde’s situation even worse is that it had once been so good. But she made one mistake: she disagreed with her boss – or, rather, expressed an opinion that was contrary to his during a presentation. “That meeting was where it all started, absurd though it may seem. Before that, there was nothing wrong . . . She had been deputy director of marketing in the main health and nutrition division of an international food company for more than eight years.”
De Vigan’s narrative, written mainly in the continuous present tense, is intelligent and direct; her prose is plain and efficient. Her gift is for knowing how people think and, even more important, how they feel as their worlds come toppling down around them. She understands how fragile a human ego is, and Mathilde’s has been systematically pulverised.
Over the course of several months, Mathilde’s vengeful boss, Jacques, the man who was once her mentor and who had had the vulnerability to ask her not to wear high heels whenever they had to stand together at a meeting or a presentation, has viciously undermined her. She has been left out of meetings and left out of the loop, and her colleagues now appear to be aware that to be seen chatting with her amounts to professional suicide. Whereas formerly she directed and encouraged, she is now treated as a pariah and ignored.
Mathilde battles despair and rage. She imagines killing Jacques. Only gradually does de Vigan fill out the story of the other world her central character inhabits, as a widowed mother raising three sons alone.
The daily commute is an odyssey in itself, although this only becomes apparent to Mathilde in her now weakened state. She is lucky that her shadowy children are so well behaved; readers may wonder at how undemanding these boys are. But de Vigan has decided to concentrate all of this woman’s woes within the workplace.
In fairness, they are considerable issues. Having forced her body to make the effort to get to work, she discovers that her office has been given to a younger woman. Mathilde has been moved to an empty space beside the toilets, leaving her to listen to a range of unpleasant sounds. Her files have been placed on a memory stick. When a replacement computer is installed she realises that she no longer has access to the general office file. It had been serving as her sole source of information, as she is no longer told anything.
Her panic and resentment are brilliantly conveyed by de Vigan. There is a hint of Kafka about it all, except that we know the villain is the petty line manager intent on destroying Mathilde. Into this feud arrives the human-resources manager – well groomed and believed to be conducting an affair with a much younger man – who soon discovers that any help she devises for Mathilde is immediately destroyed by Jacques.
If there is a flaw in this compelling novel it is de Vigan’s decision to include a second troubled character, a doctor named Thibault. As his parallel story opens he has just managed to end a destructive relationship with a coolly detached young woman who appears incapable of any commitment beyond sex. De Vigan creates an interesting study of a man on the verge of a different kind of breakdown.
Much of his response to life is conveyed through his ambivalent feelings towards Paris. These sequences on the theme of a city’s indifference to the human insects inhabiting it are not quite as convincing as the helpless fury of a woman being scorned and isolated by her boss, and all without a hint of sexual vendetta.
The office war of attrition progresses; Mathilde makes several attempts to speak with Jacques. He avoids all contact. When he does answer a call from her, he proceeds to conduct a bogus conversation during which he repeatedly accuses her of insulting him. She remains silent while he loudly objects to her foul language and abuse, all within earshot of the other employees. As an enemy, the erratic, unstable Jacques is cunning, relentless and resourceful.
When not contemplating the dismantling of her career, Mathilde wonders what it would be like to meet someone, “a man who would understand”. But she is practical, and quickly concedes that “desperate people don’t meet. Or maybe only in films . . . And often they repel each other like the identical poles of magnets.”
No and Me , shortlisted for the Prix Goncourt in 2009, is a beguiling moral fable in which a clever young girl, damaged by her parents’ grief over the death of her younger sister, attempts to help a slightly older girl, a homeless addict. It is a profoundly touching story in which Lou, the young narrator, discovers many truths. Underground Time is different, and de Vigan’s view of backstabbing corporate politics will amuse and chill. Her boldly intuitive novel may not quite engage, but it does convince and often succeeds, most certainly when describing the helpless fury of Mathilde and the wary detachment of her gutless colleagues. It is too real for comfort.
Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent
Underground Time, By Delphine de Vigan
Reviewed by Emma Hagestadt
Thursday 30 June 2011 23:00 BST
0 comments
Every morning Mathilde takes the Metro to her job in the marketing department of a large French corporation. Ever since a disagreement with her narcissistic boss, life in the office has taken a turn for the worse.
Meanwhile on the other side of Paris, paramedic Thibault is getting over an affair with a woman with whom he connects in bed, but who barely looks at him when dressed.
This appealing novelette, judiciously translated by George Miller, follows Mathilde and Thibault as they negotiate the start of an unpromising summer.
The narrative gains momentum in the second half, but despite a close encounter at the Gare de Lyon, the commuters fail to connect. As in her best-known novel, No and Me, de Vigan writes about the loneliness of modern city life.
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Underground Time, By Delphine de Vigan
With all that money and sex, don't you pity these characters?
David Evans
Sunday 11 March 2012 00:00 GMT
0 comments
Delphine de Vigan's follow-up to the prizewinning No and Me alternates between two unhappy protagonists.
Mathilde is dissatisfied with her marketing job because her overbearing boss is not giving her enough to do: "I earn three thousand euros a month and I want to work!" she moans. (Poor her.) Thibault, a paramedic, is dissatisfied with his relationship with his sex-mad girlfriend, who "could only love him when horizontal". (Poor him.)
The author never fully explores her characters' inner lives, and as a result their mopeyness seems out of proportion with the facts as they appear. Still, the ending, which nods to Baudelaire, is refreshingly ambiguous.
QUOTED: "Underground Time has the germ of a good novel in it, but unfortunately that germ didn’t quite develop the way it might have. Read it for Mathilde’s extraordinary poise under pressure; skip the rest."
Underground Time by Delphine De Vigan
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Review by Allison Slegenthaler
The central problem with Underground Time, Delphine de Vigan’s 2009 novel, is that it is trying to be too many things at once. Is it a philosophical meditation on isolation? A romance? An examination of bullying in the workplace? All these options remain on the table for the duration, and the book suffers for its lack of commitment.
Underground Time follows two Parisians through a single day, the twentieth of May: Mathilde, a businesswoman, and Thibault, a paramedic. Both are deeply unhappy with their lives, dragged along by the bustle of modern life and the loneliness of the city they inhabit. Much of the book is spent taking a long, slow path through the minds of Mathilde and Thibault, revisiting memories which recall better, more connected times in their lives. Thibault is a bachelor, Mathilde a widow, and essentially they are loners. No friends are mentioned, no meaningful adult relationships endure – Thibault’s lover, the distant Lila, is gone within the first thirty pages, and Mathilde’s most enduring connections are to her young sons.
At the same time, there’s a constant thread running through both stories implying that today, the twentieth of May, is the day both Mathilde and Thibault will meet the one person who can fix their lives forever. It’s not much of a leap on the reader’s part to see that we’re supposed to want them to get together by the end, but unfortunately this facet of the plot feels artificially tacked on. The real thrust of Underground Time, and the aspect of it worth focussing on, hinges on how these two people, who live very different lives with distinct concerns and motivations, will find their ways out of the holes they’ve landed in.
Mathilde’s story is really what holds the narrative together: it’s Gaslight updated for the boardroom, and the slow lurch towards the climax is the best writing de Vigan offers (she has an irritating habit of peppering her writing with incomplete sentences, breaking up the flow). Jacques, Mathilde’s boss, is slowly removing all traces of Mathilde’s presence from their office while pretending nothing is wrong, and she struggles to understand his motivations and to re-assert herself as a meaningful contributor to her workplace.
Thibault’s half of the book – which chronicles the various emergency calls he responds to during the day, visiting other lonely and desperate people in Paris – is not really as arresting or salient at Mathilde’s, especially (I suspect) for anyone interested in CWWS. I would have preferred to have the entirety of Underground Time devoted to Mathilde, especially as Thibault turns out to be, essentially, a cipher. Underground Time never really stops being about Mathilde, even when she’s absent from the page, and the words spent away from her feel wasted. If anything, the device that keeps threatening to bring Mathilde and Thibault together detracts from rather than enhances the plot, and any nods to romance only feel perfunctory.
Underground Time has the germ of a good novel in it, but unfortunately that germ didn’t quite develop the way it might have. Read it for Mathilde’s extraordinary poise under pressure; skip the rest.
This entry was posted in Book Review and tagged blog, bloomsbury, book review, guest blog on 18/10/2013 by pgcwwn.
Underground Time
Delphine de Vigan
Translated from the original French by George Miller
Longlist 2013
Everyday Mathilde takes the Metro to the office of a large multinational, where she works in the marketing department. And every day Thibault, a paramedic, drives to the addresses he receives from his controler. Mathilde is unhappy at work, frozon out of office life by her moody boss.
Meanwhile, Thibault is unhappy in love and all too aware that he may be the only human being many of the people he visits will see for the entire day. Mathilde and Thibault seem to be just two anonymous figures in a crowded city, pushed and shoved and pressured continuously by the isolating urban world. But surely these two complementary souls, travelling along separate paths, must meet?
(From Publisher)
About the Author
Delphine de Vigan is the author of several novels, including Jolis Garçons, Soir de décembre and Les heures souterraines. No and Me, published simultaneously in young adult and adult editions by Bloomsbury in March 2010, and then in paperback in August 2010, is her first novel to be published in English; it was a bestseller in France, where it was awarded the Prix des Libraires (The Booksellers’ Prize) in 2008, and was also a bestseller in Italy.
Her second novel, Underground Time, published in April 2011 and in paperback in February 2012, is a novel of quiet violence – the violence of office-bullying, the violence of the brutality of the city – in which two characters move towards an inevitable meeting.
Librarians’ Comments
The story exposes the brutal truth of what the big city really is. It is a story about being lost and solitude. About a man and a woman who lose control over their lives. It makes us think about Mathilde and Thibault – people we pass everyday in the street. And think what would happen if we were them.
There are two victims in this novel: a markting manager who is at the mercy, or lack of mercy, of a ruthless corporate machine that has the power to destroy lives and a paramedic who is a slave to the central control which dispatches him to the sick, the dying, the helpless and the hopeless. Set within a single day, those two disparate and quietly desperate people look out on their soulless and loveless urban world, pushed and shoved by pressures they cannot control. A contemplation of the potential and often very real brutality of 21st century city life. An elegant and eloquent prose.
Underground Time is a great novel; it presents the brutality of a city, in which our two characters move towards an inevitable meeting.
Nothing Holds Back the Night by Delphine de Vigan – review
Ursula Le Guin is fascinated by a dark yet luminous memoir that straddles the line between fiction and non-fiction
Ursula Le Guin
Sat 23 Nov 2013 03.15 EST
First published on Sat 23 Nov 2013 03.15 EST
Delphine de Vigan
The line between fiction and non-fiction can blur into a zone of shadow and uncertainty. What is the "true" story, when memories of it differ widely and all contain great gaps? The difficulty of ever answering Pontius Pilate's question, "What is truth?", leads some writers to treat the difference between factual and fictional accounts as trivial.
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People who live under a dictatorship know better. Borges said "All history is fiction," but he didn't say: "All fiction is history." To recognise that all historians invent isn't to say that it doesn't matter if a fiction is called history. Despite the shadow zone of overlap, the distinction is there.
What you call it matters. If you say your story is made up, your fake facts may be of great value as inventions revealing truth. But if you say your made-up story is non-fiction, your faked facts are lies.
Those are rather inflexible rules, and many writers choose to break them. Fiction has always comfortably contained a vast amount of fact and history; now non-fiction is claiming the right to an ever larger proportion of invention. A few memoirists, faking a little too vigorously, have gained a succès de honte, but most semi-factual memoirs are accepted without question. A modern preference for non-fiction may account for the increase in what might be called non‑factual non-fiction.
The cover flap of Delphine de Vigan's book, which is translated by George Miller, calls it a novel. I don't think it is a novel, but I respect the author's honesty in not calling it a memoir. The first part of it, the portrait and history of a family, combines apparently factual accounts drawn from interviews and other sources, with long passages of fiction: inventions by the author-character – descriptions of scenes she did not witness, thoughts she imagines in the minds of people alive before she was born.
To me these are the finest part of the book. Because the author-character openly discusses her rights and responsibilities in trying to reconstruct the family in which her mother grew up, there's no moral queasiness, no need to ask "Is that true or are you making it up?" And because her skill and powers of invention are superb, the imagined passages are completely satisfying.
What's more, the material is fascinating in itself: an improbably large French family, remarkable for beauty, vitality, talent, irresponsibility, alienation, and tragedy – absolutely the stuff of novels.
Then, about midway, the book changes tone and subject. Abandoning overt invention, it becomes a more conventional memoir: a daughter's portrait of a fascinating, unstable mother who survived madness at a high cost to herself and both her daughters, and at last killed herself.
Autobiographies and memoirs have made such a subject curiously familiar – less original, and perhaps less valuable, than the attempt to imagine how a family inevitably seen and described as "happy" shaped one of its children to become that unhappy woman.
This is not one of those tiresome books where the "inner child" is allowed to whine about its parent. Whether or not De Vigan is identical with the author-character, her portrait of the mother, Lucile, as an elusive girl who becomes a deeply troubled woman, is compassionate and powerful, as well as painful and shocking. Still, we've been here before. The many memoirs of addiction, senile dementia and insanity run the same risk: extreme pathology devalues personhood, devours the individual. As doctors speak of a patient as "the new cancer in Room 121", a reviewer might feel like saying "the new bipolarity novel …"
So what I will remember from Nothing Holds Back the Night is not the last half, written in an increasingly bare, dry style that signals painful factuality, the paragraphs growing shorter till they are almost telegraphic and often banal. I will remember the first half, where the luminous accuracy of the prose reminds me of Colette, where the mixture of reported reminiscence, family legend and empathetic invention is so effective, and where the Poirier family – parents and children – appear in a kind of Renoir sunlight, overflowing with life and vibrant personalities, almost enough to conceal the lurking darkness.
In a passage of self-examination, the author-character writes: "I probably set out to pay homage to Lucile, to give her a coffin made of paper – for these seem the most beautiful of all to me – and a destiny as a character. But I know too that I am using my writing as a way of looking for the origin of her suffering, as though there were a precise moment when the core of her self was breached in a definitive, irreparable way …"
Whether that quest can ever be fulfilled, her book is what her delicate and mysterious metaphor promises – a beautiful paper coffin, inscribed with words chosen with painful care and tenderness.
• Ursula Le Guin's latest book is Lavinia (Phoenix).
QUOTED: "Although language must inevitably fail to capture her full complexity, de Vigan’s mysterious mother does flash into life in this 'novel,' which, despite its darkness, is shot through with light. Perhaps what’s most amazing is that, repeatedly, in the midst of tragedy, its author suddenly thrusts us into the noisy, crazy, generous heart of her mother’s."
A Mother in Absentia
‘Nothing Holds Back the Night,’ by Delphine de Vigan
By NANCY KLINEMAY 9, 2014
In her wrenching new book, a memoir camouflaged as a novel, the prominent French writer Delphine de Vigan sets out to “write my mother,” tracing the life of the woman she calls Lucile Poirier from her early childhood just after World War II to her suicide in 2008 at the age of 61. Woven into this dark tale is the equally absorbing story of a daughter’s quest to research and imagine an elusive woman in order to get close to her, even though her very essence embodied distance: “For all of us, Lucile — her gentleness and her aggression — remains a mystery.” The difficulty de Vigan has in describing her mother, she confesses, “is not so far removed from the distress we felt as children and teenagers when she disappeared.” Which she did, dramatically, in a series of manic episodes, beginning in her early 30s.
Born into a boisterous family of nine children, de Vigan’s mother was a fashion model by the age of 7, featured in posters plastered all over Métro stations, while “the children in her class and in every class in Paris . . . received a blotter with Lucile’s face on it.” Her father — the seductive, devouring Minotaur at the center of the family maze — works in advertising, and his favorite daughter, to her sorrow, is Lucile. “I was a very beautiful child,” she recalls, “and I paid a high price for it.” Visual imagery rules her father’s world, and the book written in search of her is, aptly, a compilation of images dominated, above all, by those of her body.
On the cover of “Nothing Holds Back the Night” is a photograph of Lucile — a young, lovely, pensive, unmistakably French woman dressed in a black turtleneck, a cigarette in one hand, at the dinner table. The next image, the written one that initiates the text, is her decomposing corpse, “blue, a pale blue mixed with the color of ashes.”
Photo
Delphine de Vigan Credit Benjamin Chelly
Soon the authorial camera swivels back to several childhood scenes: Lucile’s siblings at play, while she watches from the sidelines; a modeling session; a clamorous family meal; the sudden death of a brother, an event that shatters her parents and leaves “a fault line,” “an indelible imprint” on her.
Ultimately, we are shown the book’s most searing image. It is Jan. 31, 1980. Lucile, now a young mother, has gone mad. Her naked body covered with white paint, she stands entirely exposed in her apartment window, visible to all in the street below and to her 13-year-old daughter, Delphine, who watches, terrified, from an apartment across the way as her mother threatens to kill Delphine’s younger sister.
It is this moment that is at the heart of de Vigan’s work: “I know that the origin of my writing is there, in those few hours which caused our lives to fall apart.” But she knows, too, that the tools of her trade — her words — are imperfect, ineffectual. Her mother will always remain unreachable: “I have written about Lucile’s first committal in a few pages. I know how inadequate they are. . . . Even today, I am looking at the scene from afar, unable to decipher it, I am — literally and metaphorically — in the building across the street.”
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Although language must inevitably fail to capture her full complexity, de Vigan’s mysterious mother does flash into life in this “novel,” which, despite its darkness, is shot through with light. Perhaps what’s most amazing is that, repeatedly, in the midst of tragedy, its author suddenly thrusts us into the noisy, crazy, generous heart of her mother’s and her own “joyful but ravaged family.”
NOTHING HOLDS BACK THE NIGHT
By Delphine de Vigan
Translated by George Miller
342 pp. Bloomsbury. Paper, $17.
Nancy Kline’s most recent book is “Selected Prose and Poetry of Jules Supervielle,” which she translated with Patricia Terry and Kathleen Micklow.
A version of this review appears in print on May 11, 2014, on Page BR31 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: A Mother in Absentia. Today's Paper|Subscribe
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QUOTED: "This harrowing inquiry in to the heart of the familial memory reveals brighter memories as much as hidden secrets. Fascinating and very sensitive."
Nothing Holds Back the Night
Delphine de Vigan
Translated from the original French by George Miller
2015 Longlist
Only a teenager when Delphine was born, Lucile raised two daughters largely alone. She was a former child model from a Bohemian family, younger and more glamorous than the other mothers: always in lipstick, wayward and wonderful. But as Delphine grew up, Lucile’s occasional sadness gave way to overwhelming despair and delusion. She became convinced she was telepathic, in control of the Paris metro system; she gave away all her money; she was hospitalized, medicated, and released in a kind of trance. Young Delphine was left to wonder: What changed her, or what shaped her all along?
In this brilliant investigation into her own family history, Delphine de Vigan attempts to “write her mother,” seeking out something essential as she interviews aging relatives, listens to recordings, and reads Lucile’s own writings. It is a history of luminous beauty and rambunctious joy, of dark secrets and silences. There are untimely deaths and failures of memory. There are revelations and there is the ultimately unknowable. And in the face of the unknowable, personal history becomes fiction: De Vigan must choose from differing accounts and fill in important gaps, using her writer’s imagination to reconstruct a life.
De Vigan writes her most expansive novel yet with acute self-awareness and marvelous sympathy. Nothing Holds Back the Night is a remarkable work, universally recognizable and singularly heartbreaking.
(From Publisher)
About the Author
Delphine de Vigan is the author of No and Me, which was a bestseller in France, where it was awarded the Prix des Libraires (The Booksellers’ Prize) in 2008, and in Britain, where it was a Richard and Judy selection. Underground Time was shortlisted for the prestigious Goncourt Prize in 2009. Her books have been translated into twenty-five languages. She lives in Paris.
About the Translator
George Miller is the translator of No and Me and Underground Time by Delphine de Vigan. He is also a regular translator for Le Monde diplomatique‘s English-language edition and the translator of Disordered World by Amin Maalouf.
Librarian’s Comments
This brilliant piece of reading, partly a biography and partly fiction, poignantly recounts an emotionally very fragile woman’s distressing life until the suicide. The author of the book strives to understand what led to to such a tragic end of life.
After the brutal death of her mother, Delphine de Vigan describes the person she was and what built her. This harrowing inquiry in to the heart of the familial memory reveals brighter memories as much as hidden secrets. Fascinating and very sensitive.
QUOTED: "Well-structured, with moments of tenderness and truth about family and home, inadequate parents and neglected children, No and Me is honest (as revealing and insightful about Lou and home life as it is about No and homelessness) but also at least partially reassuring."
No and Me, By Delphine de Vigan
A young French girl's 'large-scale experiment against fate' does not go according to plan
Reviewed by Daniel Hahn
Sunday 28 February 2010 00:00 GMT
0 comments
Little Parisian girl Lou Bertignac is 13 and very precocious indeed. With an IQ of 160 and two years ahead of her age-group at school, she spends her free time conducting scientific tests, developing theories about how the world works, counting and defining things – as a way of entertaining herself, and to take her mind off matters that would otherwise make her cry. Her family has been struggling to hold things together since the death of her baby sister, and her mother is distant.
Lou is fearful and vulnerable, and the last thing she wants to do is to give a presentation in front of her whole class. But then, watching people come and go at Austerlitz station (she likes watching the emotion), Lou strikes up a conversation with No, who is 18, pretty in spite of the dirt and her missing tooth, and homeless. Lou chooses the plight of the homeless as the subject for her class presentation, and No will be her interviewee.
But however much Lou may want things to fit her provable theories, to obey predictable rules, she will learn that "Things are what they are," that's all. Her teacher, M. Marin, describes her as "Utopian". (She thinks it's a compliment but goes to look it up in a dictionary to check and then isn't so sure.) Her friend, Lucas, who becomes her accomplice in the plot to rescue No for a better life, is older, and wise enough to know that they might not have the strength to change the world quite as dramatically as Lou hopes.
When No takes up temporary residence with Lou's imperfect family, to Lou's surprise her presence there has a greater effect on Lou and her parents than on No herself. A few nights in a proper bed with home-cooked meals isn't enough to transform her life – Delphine de Vigan deftly resists that particular fairy-tale. But there does remain something unworldly about No and Me, something that keeps it apart from pure, gritty and grim realism. Which is not to say that it side-steps the issues, or pulls back from the truth, or over-simplifies the questions it asks, which it doesn't; rather, the unworldliness comes down to our narrator, Lou.
Originally published in France as an adult novel, No and Me has been chosen for "crossover" treatment by its English publishers, produced simultaneously in adult and teen editions differing only in their cover designs. Indeed, it is easier to see a teen readership connecting with the way the story is told. The perspective is very robustly Lou's throughout (her inability to see inside No's head is significant), and she is allowed – expected – not to understand things completely; to have questions that are not fully answered by the world around her; to feel powerless to control the story as she would like. But adult readers, too, will be charmed by Lou's voice, which is strongly sustained, her intellectual precociousness usefully excusing the fact that she doesn't quite sound like a normal 13-year-old girl.
Well-structured, with moments of tenderness and truth about family and home, inadequate parents and neglected children, No and Me is honest (as revealing and insightful about Lou and home life as it is about No and homelessness) but also at least partially reassuring. Lou's "large-scale experiment against fate" might not go quite according to plan, but De Vigan shows that things really can change, albeit not always in the ways we've anticipated, and not always in ways we can control.
QUOTED: "It never loses sight of the social and moral issues it explores and, as it juxtaposes a lonely home with homelessness, it lifts itself into one of those singular books that absolutely anybody can read and be touched by. A great deal of rot is talked about crossover fiction that can be read by child and adult alike, but this truly is a genuine example."
No and Me by Delphine de Vigan
No and Me by Delphine de Vigan
Category: Teens
Rating: 5/5
Reviewer: Jill Murphy
Reviewed by Jill Murphy
Summary: A beautiful story all about home - how someone who lives in a house with their family can be just as homeless as someone on the streets. Beautifully translated and tremendously moving, it's for readers aged eight to eighty-eight.
Buy? Yes Borrow? Yes
Pages: 256 Date: March 2010
Publisher: Bloomsbury
External links: Author's website
ISBN: 1408807513
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Lou is a clever, clever child with an IQ approaching 160. She's thirteen, but she's been moved up two years at school and she compares her flat chested, nervous self somewhat unfavourably with her fifteen-year-old peer group. Funnily enough, her only real friend at school is Lucas, who's seventeen and such a rebel that he's been moved down two years. Things at home aren't great for Lou. Her baby sister died a few years ago and her mother has been severely depressed ever since. She barely talks, seldom gets dressed. Her father is worn down to the bone with worry and Lou doesn't get a great deal of attention from him either, so distracted is he.
And then, under pressure in class, Lou decides to do a project on the homeless and chooses a girl she's seen at the railway station as her interviewee. No is eighteen and has been on the streets for a long time. She's the first real outside contact Lou has ever made and, over the weeks of interviews, a bond begins to develop between these wildly disparate two girls. When the project ends, Lou is desperate not to lose contact with No and begs her parents to take her in. Amazingly, they agree, and the decision marks the first step in the healing process for that unhappy home. But can it do the same for No?
Oh, No and Me ticks all my boxes. I was always going to love it, right from the get go. Its central character is a bookish child who finds it difficult to fit in. There's a genuine kitchen sink drama going on at home. The background themes are all about strong social issues, especially homelessness and equality of opportunity. There's been a great deal of buzz about how unusual and even unique it is. And, happily, it fulfilled all my expectations. It's sweet on the outside and tough on the inside. It's beautifully observed and it doesn't feel the need to wrap up every teensy tiny loose end. Instead, it leaves us with pause for thought.
It's such a clever book too - Lou veers wildly between reliable and unreliable narrator, as her precocious intellect gets many things right and her pre-pubescent heart gets things completely wrong. As a mother, I found seeing her try so hard to make things right utterly heartrending but I can imagine younger readers finding everything she does and says making complete sense. It's made the transition across the Channel remarkably well - French mores are very different to British ones and while Lou, No and the others are unmistakably French, the emotional landscape they inhabit isn't strange at all. And George Miller's translation is pitch perfect.
This book speaks to coming-of-age, to family dynamics and to the solitary nature of addiction, and yet it doesn't feel like a book about individuality. It never loses sight of the social and moral issues it explores and, as it juxtaposes a lonely home with homelessness, it lifts itself into one of those singular books that absolutely anybody can read and be touched by. A great deal of rot is talked about crossover fiction that can be read by child and adult alike, but this truly is a genuine example.
Bloomsbury are bringing out both adult and teen editions (I'm reviewing the teen version here) and I hope this gets No and Me the wide readership it thoroughly deserves because it really does speak to us all.
Recommended.
My thanks to the good people at Bloomsbury for sending the book.
If you'd like to explore more French writers, we also loved Dog by Daniel Pennac - dogs need homes too, you know. Our favourite homeless character in all of children's literature is, of course, David Almond's Skellig by David Almond.
Buy No and Me by Delphine de Vigan at Amazon You can read more book reviews or buy No and Me by Delphine de Vigan at Amazon.co.uk.
Buy No and Me by Delphine de Vigan at Amazon You can read more book reviews or buy No and Me by Delphine de Vigan at Amazon.com.
QUOTED: "a deeply personal voice with a narrow focus that feels all-consuming. Lou is the very real, flawed, sympathetic person who gets to tell this story, but No is always very much there. She may be in the background but her actions—both on and off-stage—are a huge presence in the novel."
Based on a True Story by Delphine de Vigan review – disturbing metafictional tale
A French sensation probes the nature of truth with the story of a kindred spirit who takes over the author’s life
Joanna Briscoe
Sat 15 Apr 2017 09.59 EDT
Last modified on Wed 29 Nov 2017 04.43 EST
Memorably creepy narrative … Delphine de Vigan.
If Simone de Beauvoir had written Single White Female with nods to Marguerite Duras, the result might be something like this latest Gallic grip-lit sensation. Based on a True Story was published in France in 2015, became a bestseller, won a number of French prizes and was bought for an adaptation to be directed by Roman Polanski. Mais bien sûr.
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De Vigan writes “autobiographical fiction”, then deconstructs it, examining where fact meets fabrication, and questioning the very nature of the fictional process. Her last novel, No and Me, was a bestseller in the UK, and Nothing Holds Back the Night, based on her mother’s suicide, brought her both acclaim and notoriety in France.
In Based on a True Story, translated by George Miller, Delphine tells of her inability to write for three years, culminating in defeat by shopping lists and panic at Word documents. The narrative traces this back to the arrival of a stranger, “L.”, at a point when the naturally shy Delphine is overwhelmed by the huge impact of the “personal, intimate book” she has published. L. enters her life precisely when she is “so fragile, so shifting, so liable to crumble”.
L. is a kindred spirit of the same age as Delphine who lives nearby, and rapidly takes on a pivotal role in her life. Glamorous, polished and assertive, L., who is allegedly a ghostwriter, represents much that the narrator aspires to be. But although we know from the outset that this unsettling life-stealer is to become a malign force, and the narrative could so easily follow a loony tunes trajectory towards a Girl on the Train or Fatal Attraction-style implausibility splurge, De Vigan is far too intelligent and feminist to venture into full bunny-boiler territory.
Delphine has two grown-up children and lives partly with her lover François in the country, partly alone in Paris. In her burnt-out hermit state, she is ripe for invasion, but again she is scrupulously honest: “It’s tempting to say that L. broke into my life, with the sole aim of annexation, but that would be untrue. L. entered gently, with boundless delicacy …”
L. makes herself indispensable. She dresses like Delphine, answers her emails and writes a preface in her name
L. makes herself indispensable, but is soon interfering with the direction of Delphine’s work. She dresses like her, answers her emails and writes a preface in her name. Her lies and half-truths mount up, and when L. claims to have attended the same school as Delphine, despite the fact that Delphine has no memory of it, all alarm bells are jangling. The most memorably creepy moment comes when L. actually impersonates the reclusive Delphine, with her full permission, to deliver a talk.
As the novel tracks Delphine’s collusion with this “gradual process of enchantment”, the grip tightens, even as the story-within-a-story ruminates on the nature of fiction. It is all terribly meta: De Vigan plays with the tropes of the psychological thriller, but her work is steeped in philosophical ruminations. L. expounds at length on the subject of autobiographical writing, and her navel-gazing bouts of undergraduate theorising are the only sections that impede the pace.
“Ultimately, I know nothing about L. and never have.” Where is L.? What is she? By the end, we are forced to question narrator reliability, her psychological wellbeing and, once more, the nature of truth. At what level do we read this book? Are symbols superseding mundane old facts? It doesn’t really matter. After such labyrinthine obfuscations, we are left with a deep curiosity that lends the novel an intriguing afterlife. Like it or not, to read this to the full, you are forced to become a hypocrite lecteur.
• Joanna Briscoe’s latest novel, Touched, is published by Arrow. Based on a True Story is published by Bloomsbury. To order a copy for £11.04 (RRP £12.99) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
YA Review: No and Me by Delphine de Vigan
10/22/2012
12 Comments
No and Me cover
No and Me
Author: Delphine de Vigan
Publisher: Bloomsbury USA Childrens
Publication Date: 8/3/10
[Goodreads|Amazon]
Blurb(GR): The international award-winning story of two girls from different backgrounds, united in friendship
Parisian teenager Lou has an IQ of 160, OCD tendencies, and a mother who has suffered from depression for years. But Lou is about to change her life—and that of her parents—all because of a school project about homeless teens. While doing research, Lou meets No, a teenage girl living on the streets. As their friendship grows, Lou bravely asks her parents if No can live with them, and is astonished when they agree. No’s presence forces Lou’s family to come to terms with a secret tragedy. But can this shaky, newfound family continue to live together when No’s own past comes back to haunt her?
Winner of the prestigious Booksellers’ Prize in France, No and Me is a timely and thought-provoking novel about homelessness that has far-reaching appeal.
Review:
One of my most vivid memories from childhood is the first time I realized that homelessness is a regularly occurring thing. I think I was about five or six, and as my parents and I were climbing into our old car, a man came up and asked my father for some spare change so he could get something to eat. My father gave him some coins but I was so shocked and devastated. It didn’t seem like enough. Surely this man needed immediate help! When we got home, I went to the plastic jar where I’d been storing up loose change for months, hauled it out, and demanded that we go back and find that man so I could give it to him. In my child’s mind, that jar was a vast fortune, capable of solving the whole situation. My mom brushed it off and demurred, but I didn’t understand. There was a man out there who didn’t have enough to eat and obviously that was an emergency that needed to be dealt with. I felt anxiety for that man for months afterward, wondering where he was and what happened to him.
In later years, when I didn’t have enough to eat, I learned that poverty is something that most people don’t want to hear about or acknowledge unless they’re living it. I learned that it should be a source of shame for those who experience it first-hand. I learned to hide it and pretend as much as I could that it wasn’t happening. Now, when I’m driving in my closed up, air-conditioned car I often pass by people on the street, holding up signs asking for help. And maybe I feel a stab, but I don’t stop. And I try not to think about them after I’ve passed.
This book so artfully encompasses both of those points of view: the child’s and the adult’s. Lou, the thirteen year old narrator, is a child prodigy wise beyond her years in some ways but still very immature in others. When she begins interviewing eighteen year old No, homeless and abandoned by everyone she ever counted on, she wants to save her. She’s old enough to know that saving No is not something that she should wish for or attempt, but she’s young enough to try to do it anyway. She still has a bit of that belief left – that a jar of coins or a bath or a home or unconditional acceptance could solve everything.
I think that what hits me the hardest about this story isn’t so much that Lou would try to save No, would believe that she could save No, but that No so obviously wants to be saved. Despite knowing deep down that no amount of Lou’s help will save her, No wants it to be true. Not just for herself, but for Lou too – it’s as if she wants to give Lou the gift of her rescuing. And despite my years and years accrual of denial and apathy, these girls got to me too. Even though I knew that nothing in this world is ever solved that easily, I desperately wanted it to happen. As the story progressed and the slow but inevitable intrusion of reality set in, the sense of doom I felt really turned this quiet little book into something substantial and powerful for me.
No and Me has the kind of narration that I love best: a deeply personal voice with a narrow focus that feels all-consuming. Lou is the very real, flawed, sympathetic person who gets to tell this story, but No is always very much there. She may be in the background but her actions – both on and off-stage – are a huge presence in the novel. If you’ve ever been a square peg/over-thinker/misfit (as I believe many of us readers are) then I think you’ll probably really relate to Lou:
“I’m not too keen on talking. I always have the feeling that the words are getting away from me, escaping and scattering. It’s not to do with vocabulary or meanings, because I know quite a lot of words, but when I come out with them they get confused and scattered. That’s why I avoid stories and speeches and just stick to answering the questions I’m asked. All the extra words, the overflow, I keep to myself, the words that I silently multiply to get close to the truth.”
No’s story hit me the hardest, but I loved Lou’s as well. She’s a very closed-off and fearful person and her relationship with No (and with sweetie/layabout classmate Lucas) leads her to a very grey but fulfilling ending, which I needed after No punched me in the gut.
Delphine de Vigan’s writing is clean and subtle but powerful and I am completely impressed by the translation. I’ve read a few translated novels this year and this one really stands out. Every word just feels right. That being said, this book also feels absolutely Not American which I LOVED. I hate it when translated books are stripped of everything uniquely foreign during translation – what’s the point? I read French and German and English and Australian and etc. books because I WANT to experience something non-American.
This book reminds me quite a lot of Antonia Michaelis’ The Storyteller, but it’s much less brutal and much more quirky and sad. Apparently there’s also a film! But it’s only available overseas. Boo.
Perfect Musical Pairing
Brand New – Sowing Season
Noelle from Young Adult Anonymous gave me this song and I matched it up with this book for her in one of our challenges. I still think about this book every time I hear this song, which to me is about slow healing and recovery and about inner strength.
But, while I was listening to this song (over and over, naturally) I started thinking about how much I love songs in general that have delayed and sudden crescendos (and books too...kinda like this one, for example). And that made me think of this song:
Jimmy Eat World – Invented
Which I think is my song for Lou and Lucas and that ending which was just perfect.
4/5 Stars
Book review: No And Me by Delphine de Vigan Published: 08:41 Updated: 10:02 Saturday 20 March 2010 Share this article French author Delphine de Vigan's first novel published in English, No And Me is a funny and tender story told through the eyes of an intellectually precocious 13-year-old. Young Parisian Lou Bertignac has an IQ of 160. At school, she is more than capable. But, tiny and timid, she proves to be unpopular. At home, her mother barely speaks to her and her father struggles to keep the family together. A dreaded class presentation makes her life even more compli-cated. Settling on the plight of the homeless as her topic, she is deter-mined to make No – a pretty but grubby homeless girl she encounters at Austerlitz station – her interviewee. Persuaded by the prospect of warmth and refreshments, No eventually opens up. Lou convinces her parents to let No live with them. They agree but after a few mishaps, No is forced to leave. Lou and her school friend, Lucas, team up to save No from life on the streets, but she discovers that she may not, after all, have the strength to make the world right. Painfully honest and beautifully structured and written, this is worth having permanently on your bookshelf. 9/10
Read more at: https://www.scotsman.com/lifestyle/book-review-no-and-me-by-delphine-de-vigan-1-1233426
Book Review: No and Me, by Delphine de Vigan
No and Me, by Delphine De Vigan
ByGregor White
00:00, 9 APR 2010Updated18:52, 11 NOV 2013
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No and Me, by Delphine De Vigan
Published by Bloomsbury, £9.99
PUT on the spot in class one day, a teenager finds herself committed to interviewing a homeless person as part of a school project.
The eponymous No is that homeless person and, once she and the 13-year-old Lou begin talking, it soon becomes clear this is an encounter that will have life-changing consequences for all involved.
Academically precocious, Lou is not without her problems. Emotionally adrift in the class of older teens she has been placed with, she also has troubles at home, where her mother has remained distant since the sudden death of a younger daughter and her father struggles to hold it all together in a way that is fooling nobody.
Despite the dangers No faces day and daily in her life on the streets, it is often difficult to tell who really needs who more here.
Parental abandonment is a common bond between the girls, something they also have in common with No’s only other friend, class rebel Lucas.
When Lou persuades her parents to provide No with a home it seems, at first, that things are going to get better for everyone.
Not only does No manage to find a job but her very presence begins to lift the cloud from around Lou’s mother.
But, of course, nothing was ever going to be that simple really. You might be able to take the girl from the streets but it requires more than a few square meals and a comfy bed to erase a lifetime of hopelessness.
Lou is full of questions: about the meanings of words, biology, the ingredients in ready meals.
But pinning down the physical world is a lot easier than making sense of people and, while seeming to do everything that is right, it will take her far longer to understand why everything with No just seems to go wrong.
This is the first of French author de Vigan’s novels to be translated into English but in her homeland she is already something of a star and filming for a movie version of ‘No and Me’ has already begun. In that form I can see it making a pretty decent downbeat character study.
As literature, though, it is a bit one-note. There are some good lines and important ideas but not nearly enough to truly lift it off the page. It is a novel you can easily admire but real love was a task beyond me.
The “Reality” of Memoir: Delphine de Vigan’s Based on a True Story
Reviewed By Rebecca Schuh
June 1st, 2017
Once a reader asked the late writer Lucy Grealy how she recalled so many details of her past for her memoir, Autobiography of a Face. She replied wryly, “I didn’t remember it, I wrote it. I’m a writer.”
Memoirists are not transcriptionists of their pasts, recalling conversations verbatim. They are artists, whose job is to interpret the lived history through an artistic lens. But we continue to rehash a cultural debate over what is and isn’t “real” in memoirs.
This is the problem that plagued Delphine de Vigan after the publication of her novel-cum-memoir-cum-autofiction-cum-(aren’t these labels becoming tiresome), Nothing Holds Back the Night. Though she admitted that much of the book was based on her family history, she also fictionalized aspects of their lives. She did not provide a side by side guide, a Nothing Holds Back the Night: Annotated, to confirm which aspects were true and which were created by her imagination. The book became a wild success, and in the maelstrom of the literary hype cycle, de Vigan was constantly asked: What was true? What was fabrication?
Readers ask these questions of memoirists constantly, and everyone takes a different approach in answering. Chris Kraus, on I Love Dick: “It all happened. There would be no book if it hadn’t happened.” Dani Shapiro: “When I write a book, I have no interest in telling all, the way I absolutely do long to while talking to a close friend.” De Vigan’s answer was to pen an entire volume that plays with the nature of the question.
Thus begins Based on a True Story (translated into English by George Miller), which, as the title implies, is somewhat based on the concurrent events in de Vigan’s life after the publication of Nothing Holds Back the Night, though to what degree the reader can only speculate. When the book begins, the narrator (also named Delphine) is on unsteady footing following her unprecedented success. Having her emotional innards on public display proved exhausting. Amid book tours, parties, signings, and speaking engagements, where the readers talk to Delphine as though her story is a mirror for their own, threatening letters begin to arrive from someone who claims to be a member of her family.
You probably think you’ve got away with it. Perhaps you think you’ve got away with it scot free, because your book is a so-called novel and you’ve changed some names. You may even think you can just pick up your miserable little life again. But it’s too late. You’ve sown hatred and you’ll reap your reward.
The pressure of the book tour, the sudden fame, and the threatening letters leave the narrator unable to start writing her next book. These difficulties are exacerbated by a relationship she begins with a woman we know only as L.
The book utilizes conventional memoir structure, and it is revealed within the prologue that L. will come to have a devastating effect on Delphine’s life: “I’d like to describe how L. came into my life, and in what circumstance. I’d like to describe precisely the context that enabled L. to invade my private sphere and patiently take possession of it.” Subsequent chapters narrate in painstaking, at times exhausting detail, just how L., who claims to be a ghostwriter for the French elite, took root in the narrator’s life.
The relationship evolves quickly from acquaintanceship to enamored friendship to codependency. Delphine frames this with guilt—“even now I find it hard to explain how our relationship developed so quickly and how, within a few months, L. came to occupy such a place in my life,” as though it were somehow illicit or perverse for her to develop an intimate friendship so quickly. But to me, it wasn’t particularly shocking.
Nobody bats an eye when a romantic relationship develops with alarming acceleration. Why don’t we offer the same generosity to friendship? I thought of the movie Bridesmaids, how quickly Rose Byrne’s character inserts herself into Maya Rudolph’s life, to the point of comic relief. There’s no explanation for these incendiary friendships—the chemistry just explodes. We try to impress new friend the exact same way we try to impress new lovers. We use the same tricks, the same flattery. We are full of the same fears.
The narrator knows that intimate friendship does not fall far from the tree of sexual intimacy. “A bit later, L. got up and started dancing again among the dozen or so people, slipping among them to face me. Today, and in the light of what happened, I do not doubt that this scene could be read as a seduction display and indeed that’s how it strikes me.” L. binds herself to the narrator from the instant they meet, and the narrator falls for the age-old trick of loving the person who puts you on a pedestal. But soon after the book illustrates how a friendship like this can develop, it exposes a dark underbelly.
L.’s behavior grows increasingly possessive and, well, creepy. Again, de Vigan notes the parallels to a romantic relationship: “If a man had said these things to me, I would instantly have thought it was an access of jealousy and brought it to a halt without further discussion.” When you get too close to someone poisonous, the lines between ‘friend’ and ‘lover’ become meaningless. Obsession is a disturbingly easy trap to fall into.
L. is like a creepy man who purposefully gets into relationships with women when they’re at their most vulnerable. She cuts off Delphine’s access to the world, she tries to erode Delphine’s trust in her friends and colleagues. L. reveals that she’s read everything that the narrator has ever written, offhandedly mentions texts that were seminal to Delphine’s artistic upbringing, offers to complete the narrator’s menial writing tasks, and unearths eerie ‘coincidences’ from their pasts.
The narrator was not lying when she said she would try to record the events as they happened. At times Based on a True Story reads more like a policeman’s logbook than a novel—its painstaking detail can grow laborious. It’s as though de Vigan is saying to readers who wanted more of the truth, “here, take the truth, in all its methodical detail,” a punishment for their obsessive curiosity. More fascinating than the minute-by-minute reporting of the escalating relationship with L. is the narrator’s riffing on her frustrations with her readers’ obsession with truth.
So it was true then; that was what people expected: the real, guaranteed by a label stamped on films and books like the red or organic label on food products, a certificate of authenticity. I thought that people only needed stories to interest them, overwhelm them, sweep them along. But I’d go it wrong. People wanted it to have happened somewhere; they wanted it to be verifiable. They wanted lived experience. People wanted to be able to identify, to empathise, and for that to happen, they needed reassurance about the goods; they demanded a basic level of traceability.
The narrator’s publisher, presumably responding to market pressures, pushes her to include more reality in her books. Audiences pester her by asking who was real, how conversations transpired. It’s maddening, and this book is the response.
As it turns out, what is real and not real is hard to verify. There’s no database of French ghostwriters against which to match the traits of L. (Don’t worry, I checked.) De Vigan took the frustrating responses to her work and produced a work that defies the ability to double-check its events.
Is L. a personification of the writer, her ballsier alter ego? Is it all a “narcissistic fantasy, an interpretive hallucination”? Is L. an allegory? Or is L. based on a flesh-and-blood human, and everything happened as it is laid out?
Based on a True Story elicits the very response that it claims to abhor—it makes its readers obsessed with what is true and what is made up in a literary work. It’s maddening—and I began to think that that was de Vigan’s goal. Readers may want to imagine the author as an exact copy of the narrator, but the author is a real person with a life outside the persona they’ve exposed to the public. Memoirists make the choice to turn their lives into a public document, but that isn’t an invitation to interrogate them about their livelihood and relationships. This book is a commentary on fiction, nonfiction, the ever-expanding space between the two, and how we approach that space, as writers and readers. It’s a literary thriller, and it’s a cautionary tale about the dangers of letting life and literature become too entwined. It’s clear that Delphine has spent so much time writing, talking about writing, thinking about writing, and immersed in world of writing—this, as much as the influence of L., drives her to the perilous state in which she couldn’t put pen to paper.
Maybe I’ve been brainwashed by men on Twitter positing theories about the ‘deep state,’ but the narrator’s intense attachments to literature made me think of a ‘deep literature’ in our minds, the stories that shape us and our world views and how we interact with others. When, late in the novel, L. exploits Delphine through her work, she’s getting at the deepest part of her—who is an artist without her work? When Ke$ha was in a legal battle with her former manager and abuser, Dr. Luke, over the rights to her songs, I kept thinking: This isn’t just about her rights to her songs. This is about her right to her ability to live. Ke$ha can’t just go get a temp job to pay the bills; her art is her livelihood. When someone takes away that ability, especially for an artist who makes a living off of their creativity, they’re endangering the artist’s ability to live.
Early in the book, Delphine tells of a text exchange from early in her relationship with L.: “One evening in June, L. sent me a photo of a huge piece of graffiti in black and red, which she’d noticed on a grubby wall in the 13th Arrondissement. Someone had daubed at eye level: write yourself, you will survive.” Based on a True Story adds a caveat to that sentiment: you will survive, but you may be overwhelmed, scarred, irrevocably changed.
Becca Schuh is a writer based in Brooklyn. Her arts and literary criticism has recently been published in Bookforum, Electric Literature, 3:AM Magazine, and the Village Voice. She is working on a book about alternative education and identity, based on her time at the Johnston Center for Integrative Studies. Follow her on Twitter @tamingofdeschuh. More from this author →
Based on a True Story by Delphine de Vigan review: It combines the allure of Gone Girl with the sophistication of literary fiction
This chilling new novel by Delphine de Vigan about an obsessive female relationship will keep you guessing until the very end
Lucy Scholes
Wednesday 29 March 2017 10:45 BST
0 comments
“You’ve no need to invent anything. Your life and character, the way you look at the world should be your only material,” says the woman referred to as “L” in Delphine de Vigan’s captivating novel, Based on a True Story (beautifully translated from the original French by George Miller).
L is offering advice to the narrator, a writer named Delphine: “You’ve proved to them that you know how to do something different, that you could take hold of reality, have it out with it. They’ve understood that you were looking for a different reality and that you were no longer afraid.” When Based on a True Story opens, Delphine is teetering on the edge of collapse. Her previous book – a fictionalised account of her mother’s suicide (also the subject of de Vigan’s previous book, Nothing Holds Back the Night) – won her haters inside her family, but fans outside: “I hadn’t imagined readers feeling moved or fearful. I hadn’t imagined that some would cry in front of me, nor how hard it would be for me not to cry with them,” she says.
In the midst of this emotional exhaustion, she meets L at a party. L is an alluring prospect from the start, the kind of woman Delphine tells us she isn’t – “impeccable, with her smooth hair and perfectly filed vermilion nails that seemed to gleam in the dark” – and the two women strike up a friendship. It’s oddly one-sided, though. Delphine becomes increasingly dependent on L, something that the latter, who apparently begins to dress like her new friend, encourages, but all the while she herself remains slightly aloof and unknowable. So far, so Single White Female – “At times, her silhouette stood out like a video projection of my own body on a softer, smoother surface” – an underlying sense of dread and terror spun out of everyday kindnesses and coincidences.
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The tension builds, peppered by reminders of Delphine’s “complicity” in her fate. But the fact that de Vigan takes her epigraph from Stephen King’s Misery – the story of a writer who’s kidnapped by a crazed fan and forced to rewrite the plot of his latest book to her liking – is clue enough that the heart of the story lies in the complicated relationship between writer and reader. It’s working out who’s who that’s the mystery. Delphine wants to return to writing fiction, but L, who’s a ghostwriter by trade, strongly suggests she continues to take real life as her subject, arguing that Delphine’s audience wants “authenticity” – whatever that is.
All writing is constructed on shifting sands, but I’ve never read a book that makes the complex relationship between reality and fiction both as visible, and at the same time so opaque, as here. I was captivated. Combining the allure of Gone Girl with the sophistication of literary fiction, Based on a True Story is a creepy but unapologetically clever psychological thriller that also aces the Bechdel test (at least two women in a work of fiction, talking to each other about something other than a man).
'Based on a True Story' by Delphine de Vigan is published by Bloomsbury, £12.99
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Based on a True Story
Delphine de Vigan
"This is an enchanting story that weaves itself in your mind, slowly at first, until you begin to feel just as trapped by L. as Delphine does. It is cerebral, claustrophobic, and rattling. Although on the surface it’s a novel about psychological obsession and loss, it is ultimately shrouded by a mystery that shudders to the core."
Start Reading ‘Based On a True Story’ by Delphine de Vigan
May 15, 2017
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‘People couldn’t care less. They get plenty of fables and characters, they’ve got adventures and plot twists coming out their ears. People have had enough of well-constructed intrigue, clever plot hooks, and denouements. . . . they want to be told about life, don’t you see?’
9781408878811Why we loved it: Whether you agree with Delphine or not, it’s certainly quite a statement. Based on a True Story is a remarkable novel that dismantles the definitive lines between fact and fiction, producing a story that is truly alive, harrowing, and quite simply incredible. Translated from French by George Miller, the book is self-contemplative and autobiographical, but written with all the poetic gestures of great literature. It’s smart, compelling, and as critics have dubbed it, ‘tremendously French’.
There are little references to Stephen King’s Misery throughout the novel – but you have to read the book to figure out why. And it’s worth finding out why.
But we’re not the only ones who have loved Based on a True Story. Famous filmmaker Roman Polanski is due to release his film adaption sometime later in the year, and the original French version D’apres une histoire vraie won the Prix Renaudot and the Prix Goncourt des Lyceens.
The story begins with Delphine’s statement that she would like to describe how the mysterious L. came into her life ‘to invade my private sphere and patiently take possession of it.’ Delphine is enchanted by charismatic, elusive L., and so begins her descent into an obsession that straddles the lines of friendship and love, becoming an untold dependency on each other. Quite quickly, her ambition to write vanishes, her family become an afterthought, and every action, every thought, seeks the approval and affection of L.
Before she met L., Delphine had a life that could be considered ‘normal’, more or less, for a successful novelist living in France. She has a husband and two kids, although they’re hardly mentioned throughout the book, because this is a novel about L.
And as L.’s behaviour becomes stranger and stranger, Delphine starts to believe that she is trapped in a psychological prison by the very person who was supposed to help her escape from it.
Delphine de Vigan [credit Delphine Jouandeau]-minSinister things begin to occur, causing Delphine begins to realise the deepness of her own solitude. Anonymous, cruel letters flood her mailbox. She loses the ability to write, missing countless deadlines. Her husband is gone for months on end. She begins to consider herself a failure on many fronts, and doubts that she will ever manage to write another book? Unless it’s the one you’re reading, one that’s based on a true story, that is rich with feeling and courage: the writer’s nakedness.
This is an enchanting story that weaves itself in your mind, slowly at first, until you begin to feel just as trapped by L. as Delphine does. It is cerebral, claustrophobic, and rattling. Although on the surface it’s a novel about psychological obsession and loss, it is ultimately shrouded by a mystery that shudders to the core and reminds us that there is such a thing as a literary page-turner.
Delphine de Vigan is the author of bestselling No and Me, it was awarded the Prix des Libraires in France, in Britain it was a Richard & Judy Selection. Her other novels include Nothings Holds Back the Night, which won the Prix FNAC and the Grand Prix des Lectrices de ELLE. Underground Time was shortlisted for the Prix Goncourt in 2009. D’apres une histoire vraie is a French bestseller and has won both the Prix Renaudot and the Prix Goncourt des Lyceens. Roman Polanski and Olivier Assayas are adapting it for the screen. Delphine lives in Paris.
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Book review: Delphine de Vigan’s Based on a True Story – when friendship turns sinister
Within a relatively simple narrative lies a concern that lends additional weight and interest to Delphine de Vigan’s narrative, and this concern centres on the identity of L.
The shadowy L is the sort of woman who fascinates the narrator until their relationship becomes obsessive. Getty Images
The shadowy L is the sort of woman who fascinates the narrator until their relationship becomes obsessive. Getty Images
Delphine de Vigan is preoccupied by the nature of literary and autobiographical truth. In Nothing Holds Back the Night (2013), de Vigan offered an apparently factual account of her family history, intertwined with long passages of fictional creation, which then modulated into an ostensibly conventional form of memoir about her mother’s journey to suicide. The book was met with a great deal of acclaim, much critical consternation (was this a novel? a memoir? a work of autofiction?), and an enormous – and enormously responsive – array of readers. And the effect, for de Vigan, proved devastating.
If, that is, we are to believe the description we are offered of her emotional state at the opening of her new work, Based on a True Story (translated from French by George Miller), in which the narrator (a version of de Vigan) finds herself overwhelmed by the effects of having “written a book whose impact I couldn’t have foreseen”. She is dismayed by the “collateral damage” it has caused within her family. She is exhausted by encounters with readers (“I hadn’t imagined that some would cry in front of me, nor how hard it would be for me not to cry with them”). She feels that a terrible reckoning – “a thorough stocktaking, if not a settling of the score” – is on its way. And she is haunted by questions about the future of her career (“What are you going to write after this … What can you write after this?”), and about whether she has cast herself into literary stasis by composing “A book beyond which there was nothing, beyond which nothing could be written”.
In the midst of this period of turmoil, de Vigan attends a party at which she encounters a figure who is referred to only as L. Initially, L looks as if she will bring to de Vigan’s life a sense of intimacy and reassurance; a vicarious apprehension of the attributes de Vigan feels she has always lacked (“L was perfect … I felt intimidated by such a calmly assured woman. L was exactly the sort of woman who fascinates me. L was impeccable, with her smooth hair and perfectly filed vermilion nails that seemed to gleam in the dark”); and an uncanny ability to intuit her private anxieties. When de Vigan tells her about the emotional toll the publication of her book has exacted, L responds by saying that “you must sometimes feel very alone, as though you were standing completely naked in the road” – a phrase de Vigan recognises, having used it (in conversation with somebody other than L) only a few days earlier.
Following these initial and unsettling encounters, the women become fast friends. But the intensity of L’s affection for de Vigan assumes an increasingly sinister and obsessive character. They experience a froideur arising from a disagreement about what de Vigan ought to write next (L wants de Vigan to write the truth about the consequences of publishing her last book; de Vigan wants to write something closer to pure fiction). As the novel progresses, L becomes a debilitatingly disruptive presence in de Vigan’s life. She starts to dress like her. She attempts to assume her identity by offering to handle her correspondence. Eventually, she works her way into every aspect of de Vigan’s life so comprehensively as to threaten to destroy her.
Within this relatively simple narrative lies a concern that lends additional weight and interest to de Vigan’s narrative, and this concern centres on the identity of L. Is she a real person? Is she a kind of everywoman (“L” teasingly invites “elle”)? Or is she a figure of projected fantasy, the product of de Vigan’s ravaged imagination? It is telling that she seldom interacts with other figures in the book. And when she does, it is often to behave in the kind of way de Vigan might like to, were she possessed of a different kind of character.
De Vigan keeps these questions arrestingly unresolved, and integrates them with her broader story with elegance and subtlety. She is also capable of writing with vividness and precision (“L’s body balanced on a bar stool was like static choreography that dispensed with music and attracted glances”). Cumulatively, and despite de Vigan’s tendency to use the occasional inert or inattentive phrase, these qualities result in a novel that is conceptually bold, intellectually engaging, often aesthetically rewarding, and almost always near-preposterously absorbing. Based on a true story this book might be. But in its strongest moments, it embodies the singular strengths of fiction.
Matthew Adams is a regular contributor to The National.
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Based on a True Story by Delphine de Vigan translated by George Miller - review
A sophisticated modern take on an old trope, says Jane Shilling
JANE SHILLING
Thursday 23 March 2017 17:21
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Takeover bid: Bridget Fonda, far left, and Jennifer Jason Leigh in the film Single White Female, 1992
Takeover bid: Bridget Fonda, far left, and Jennifer Jason Leigh in the film Single White Female, 1992 Rex Features
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Six years ago the author Delphine de Vigan published Nothing Holds Back the Night, a harrowing account of a family haunted by suicide and mental illness which won a clutch of literary awards.
The narrator, a writer whose first book bears the same title as Vigan’s own debut, describes the experience of being brought up by a mother, Lucile, who suffers from bipolar disorder. After Lucile’s suicide, her daughter gathers the recollections of her extended family to compose a portrait of their troubled family life.
In her acknowledgments, de Vigan thanks “my sister, my mother’s siblings, my father’s sisters and everyone who gave me their trust and their time”.
The English edition of the work described it as “autobiographical fiction” but the text itself continually questions its own form. “Unable to free myself completely from reality, I am involuntarily producing fiction,” the narrator reflects. “I’m looking for a place which is neither truth nor fable but both at once.”
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The search for that liminal territory between truth and fiction continues in de Vigan’s latest novel, Based on a True Story. The narrator is a writer named Delphine whose last book, a work based on her mother’s bipolar disorder, has been a sensational success. But success has its cost.
After an interminable book-signing she refuses to autograph one final book and decides on impulse to go to a party with an old friend rather than join her partner, François (the name of de Vigan’s own partner), in his weekend cottage.
At the party she meets L, an elegant, self-assured woman with an uncanny knack of empathy. As the party ends L offers Delphine a lift home. Some days later an anonymous letter arrives, full of accusations about her motives for writing her last book. Delphine has only just finished reading the letter when her phone rings. It is L, suggesting they meet.
Their meeting is the start of an insidious process by which L, who claims to be a ghost writer by trade, gradually comes to inhabit, undermine and all but obliterate Delphine’s career, personality and, in the end, her very existence.
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The ancient idea of the doppelgänger has inspired narratives from Doestoyevsky’s novella, The Double, to Barbet Schroeder’s 1992 film, Single White Female. De Vigan’s novel can be read as a sophisticated modern take on an old trope (a film adaptation by Roman Polanski and Olivier Assayas is planned).
But she takes her epigraph from Stephen King’s Misery — the story of a successful writer held hostage by a murderous reader who forces him to write at her command — and her narrative is as preoccupied with the relationship between writer and reader as it is with the heroine and her friend-turned-incubus.
De Vigan has said her book was written “in response to our society’s extreme fascination with what is real”, and her heroine is continually challenged about the authenticity of her writing. An unlikely mash-up of thriller and conte philosophique, Based on a True Story insists on the author’s right to blur the lines. Asked by a Paris-Match interviewer if L existed, de Vigan replied, “Yes, in one form or another.”
£12.99, Amazon, Buy it now
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Short review: Based on a True Story by Delphine de Vigan
A crime novel paints an unnerving picture of a toxic relationship
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Barry Forshaw
April 13, 2017
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Delphine de Vigan has already won the Prix Renaudot and the Prix Goncourt for her crime novel Based on a True Story. But is this a crime novel or a disturbing story of female friendship that shades into the obsessive?
The charismatic ‘L.’ is a source of fascination to a vulnerable writer (also called Delphine); and L., in turn, apparently possessing unusually attuned intelligence, inveigles herself into the life of her besotted admirer. But the relationship moves beyond a close friendship into something pathological — and dangerous. This is an unnerving picture of a toxic relationship (based on a true story) and it’s no surprise de Vigan’s study of betrayal is to be filmed by a specialist in this dark territory, Roman Polanski.
Based on a True Story, by Delphine de Vigan, translated by George Miller, Bloomsbury RRP£12.99, 378 pages
Review: Based on a True Story by Delphine de Vigan
Deborah Lacy
Based on a True Story by Delphine de Vigan is a standalone psychological thriller and a chilling work of fiction—but based on a true story—about a friendship gone terrifyingly toxic and the nature of reality.
A few months after my last novel came out, I stopped writing. For almost three years, I didn’t write a single line. Hackneyed phrases sometimes have to be taken literally: I didn’t write a formal letter, a thank-you note, a holiday postcard or a shopping list. Nothing that required any sort of effort or necessitated any concern about form. Not one line. Not one word. The sight of a pad, notebook or index card made me feel nauseous.
As the novel Based on a True Story begins, we meet a writer named Delphine who is emotionally and physically exhausted from the unexpected success of her latest book. Endless book tours, long signings, and questions about her book that require emotional answers drain Delphine. Yes, it’s a problem many writers would love to have, but in Based on a True Story it’s this exhausted state and the fear of what to write next that makes our protagonist vulnerable to the machinations of a woman known to us only by her first initial, L.
The suspense ramps up as her friendship with L. deepens and the relationship turns completely toxic. As the story unfolds, the book takes us on a journey that seems to blur the lines of fiction and nonfiction. Since the book is called Based on a True Story, the protagonist shares a name with the novel’s author, and the writing seems so personal at times, I found myself checking the book credits repeatedly to see if the publisher labeled the book nonfiction or fiction.
Even Delphine, the protagonist, isn’t sure as she talks to her “friend”:
“But there’s no such thing as truth. Truth doesn’t exist. My last book was just a clumsy, incomplete attempt to get closer to something ungraspable. A way of telling a story through a distorted lens, a prism of pain and regrets and denial. And love. You know all of that anyway. As soon as you elide, or prolong, or tighten up, or fill in the gaps, you’re writing fiction. You’re right, I was looking for the truth. But any writing about the self is a novel. The story is an illusion. It doesn’t exist. No book should be authorized to have that printed on its cover.”
But it’s all part of the fun as the narrative pulls you first into a false sense of confidence in a new friendship, and then into something more sinister.
I was excited to read and review Based on a True Story because of all the buzz surrounding it and all the awards Delphine De Vigan has won since its debut in France. It was billed as the next Gone Girl, but I enjoyed this book much more because I had more sympathy for the protagonist.
Originally written in French and translated into English by George Miller, there were a few points in the translation where I felt the word choice came from a male perspective rather than a woman’s, but in general the translation was good.
If you like psychological thrillers with a fresh perspective, Based on a True Story is a book you should definitely pick up. You may also want to check out her three other award-winning novels that have been translated into English: No and Me, awarded the 2008 Booksellers Prize; Underground Time, shortlisted for the 2009 Prix Goncourt; and Nothing Holds Back the Night, awarded the Prix Du roman Fnac, the Prix Roman France Televisions, and the Prix Renaudot des Lyceens.
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Deborah Lacy’s short mystery fiction has appeared in Mystery Weekly Magazine, the 2016 Bouchercon Anthology: Blood on the Bayou, and she has a story coming up in Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine. She also runs the Mystery Playground blog. https://www.criminalelement.com/blogs/2017/05/review-based-on-a-true-story-by-delphine-de-vigan
Delphine de Vigan: the French literary sensation behind the new Gone Girl
Delphine de Vigan's novel 'Based on a True Story' is being turned into a film
Delphine de Vigan's novel 'Based on a True Story' is being turned into a film Credit: Victoria Paterno
Celia Walden
25 March 2017 • 6:00am
For six months now, my dog-eared review copy of Based on a True Story has been doing the rounds. Mums have been sidling up to me at the school gates (‘Is it true you’ve got an early translation of…?’), friends are offering me bribes to be the next in line, and I’m no longer on speaking terms with my neighbour, who failed to return the book after the allotted three-day period. Delphine de Vigan’s new thriller may not be published here until next month, but already it has people in a word-of-mouth frenzy I’ve not seen since Gone Girl.
Two years after its publication in her native France, the 51-year-old author is as bewildered by the book’s success as she was when her editor rang to tell her that Based on a True Story had hit the half a million copy mark – and that Roman Polanski had optioned the film rights.
De Vigan outside Drouant restaurant in Paris in November 2015, having won the Prix Renaudot for Based on a True Story
De Vigan outside Drouant restaurant in Paris in November 2015, having won the Prix Renaudot for Based on a True Story
‘Because every single day of the nine months it took me to write it I had the same thought: “This really is a pile of shit,”’ says de Vigan, a slender, straight figure set against the rain-spattered French windows of her Paris apartment. ‘And, of course, as a writer that happens sometimes, but not every day. Not the absolute certainty that what you are writing isn’t just bad, but excruciating,’ she says, lowering her voice to a whisper.
Actually, excruciating is pretty apt. De Vigan’s deft description of a close female friendship turned toxic is a compulsive but agonising read. The story of a famous French author, Delphine (bearing startling similarities to de Vigan, as well as her name), who is suffering from writer’s block and befriends a beautiful younger woman, L, at a party, the novel tips its hat at Stephen King’s Misery. Because as appealing as Delphine’s ‘number one fan’ appears at the outset – with her warmth, her energy, and her attempts to get her friend writing again – alarm bells soon begin to ring.
A photograph of de Vigan’s mother, Lucile Poirier, who committed suicide in 2008
A photograph of de Vigan’s mother, Lucile Poirier, who committed suicide in 2008 Credit: Frederic Pierret
‘I’m sure that most women have lived through one of those very exclusive female friendships that are so strong – until they go off the rails,’ explains de Vigan. ‘What interests me is when there’s an abuse of power, and that moment where it all goes flying.’
It’s easy to see why Polanski decided to turn the psychological thriller into a film – expected to be selected for this year’s Cannes Film Festival – with his wife, Emmanuelle Seigner, in the title role, and Eva Green as L. When you’re not shouting at the page, trying to warn Delphine that her new best friend is trying to steal her life, you’re squinting through smokescreens trying to decipher what’s real and what’s not.
And the play on truth and fiction in the title runs as a major theme throughout the novel. ‘Because I do think people have lost their ability to suspend disbelief with fiction these days,’ says de Vigan. ‘It’s as though they don’t trust their own capacity to have an emotional reaction to something made up any more.
'They’re confident they can be touched by a drama on TV, but with books they need more than just a story. And I think we’re all voyeurs, but this fascination for human-interest news stories has been ratcheted up by reality TV and social media, where people turn their own lives into dramas, making them either more beautiful or more bleak than they really are.’
Still taken from the film adaptation of De Vigan's Un Coup Sur
Still from the film adaptation of De Vigan's 'A Coup Sur' Credit: Universal Pictures
De Vigan came to this realisation after the publication of her previous book, in 2011, Nothing Holds Back the Night, which tells the story of her (genuinely) beautiful and bleak family. ‘Everyone kept coming up to me with the same question: “Is it all true?”, to which I always wanted to reply, “Would it have had less of an impact if it was fiction? Would you have laughed less, cried less, been touched by those characters less?” And probably the answer to many of those questions would have been: “Yes.”’
An attempt to trace the life of her wayward and wonderful mother (or the woman she calls Lucile Poirier), Nothing Holds Back the Night starts with the moment she finds Poirier lying dead in her apartment, where the 61-year-old had taken her own life four days earlier.
"Her first book describes the anorexia de Vigan suffered from, aged 18, in searing detail"
‘For me, it was about paying homage to Lucile,’ de Vigan makes clear at the start of the book, written shortly after her mother’s death, when the author was in her early 40s. ‘To give her a paper coffin – the most beautiful kind, in my view.’
From there, de Vigan takes us back to Poirier’s beginnings as a child model in post-Second World War France and explores her mother’s descent from the ‘vaguely troubled’ young woman she was dismissed as being to the dangerously ill mother the writer remembers – a mother whose condition was only given a name, bipolar disorder, too late, when she was in her early 50s.
The book sold more than a million copies in France, was shortlisted for eight major literary awards (and won two), and brought de Vigan celebrity in a country where writers can still be celebrities.
Nothing Holds Back the Night has sold more than a million copies in France
De Vigan's novel 'Nothing Holds Back the Night' has sold more than a million copies in France Credit: Victoria Paterno
One of two girls born to wealthy parents (she won’t tell me what her father did – or indeed anything about him) and raised in the Parisian suburb Boulogne-Billancourt, de Vigan didn’t envisage writing as a day job until she found success with her 2007 novel, No and Me (which made the Goncourt shortlist – and the Richard and Judy Book Club over here).
But Nothing Holds Back the Night took things to a different level. Like the writer heroine of Based on a True Story, de Vigan was recognised in the street and the target of obsessive fan mail – and it didn’t sit well with her. ‘Something about this very bohemian family I wrote about – my brilliant, charismatic father and my poor mother, who had these fits nobody could explain and was several times committed – prompted such a reaction, such emotion in people.
'And although as a writer it’s everything you dream of, some readers were voyeuristic, more than voyeuristic…’ Vampiric? ‘Yes,’ she nods quickly, ‘in a way I hadn’t predicted.’
Were she British, one might accuse de Vigan of being naïve. Changing names and places in Nothing Holds Back the Night – an account that is otherwise autobiographical – might have allowed the author to recount unimaginably painful memories, but it must also have made uncovering the ‘truth’ more appealing to her ardent fans.
Privacy, however, is still valued highly in France, which lulled her into a false sense of security, and made it all the more surprising when some of those fans went to considerable lengths to dig up an old documentary made about de Vigan’s family. The film was put online, ‘and then suddenly everyone was able to access my real family – and not the characters I’d written about. You even see me as a child in the film. So it felt as though by writing the book I’d opened this box and allowed everyone to peer in.’
'No and Me' by Delphine de Vigan
'No and Me' by Delphine de Vigan
One wonders whether de Vigan will ever be able to close that box. In Nothing Holds Back the Night she describes an episode in which her mother, ‘Lucile’, is having a psychotic breakdown and standing at their apartment window naked – her body covered with white paint – threatening to kill her youngest daughter as 13-year-old Delphine watches, terrified.
Was there any element of catharsis in the recounting of these traumatic memories? ‘No,’ she flings back. ‘I’ve never considered writing as any kind of therapy. But it was a stage I think I had to go through in my literary trajectory.’
Even if it left her depressed – as some who know de Vigan have intuited from the blocked and solitary heroine so ripe for abuse in Based on a True Story? ‘I don’t think writing the book made me depressed,’ she frowns. ‘Perturbed, yes, but not depressed. That said, the consequences of the book were not simple. All that success I got was marvellous but tinged with pain.’
Delphine de Vigan photographed in Paris
Delphine de Vigan photographed in Paris Credit: Victoria Paterno
She looks out over the grey rooftops of the Latin Quarter. ‘There was some residual guilt there for the family members who had found the book hard to take, although some of my mother’s family were very happy that her story had been brought to light. But it was not a simple success, you know?’
I’m not sure any of de Vigan’s successes, past or future, have been or will be simple. She’s too keen on blurring the lines between truth and fiction for that. And whereas fiction may be a good deflection tactic for a woman who is, to meet, a little shy and not nearly vulgar enough to join the ‘look at me’ misery memoir writers of today, writing the truth is what originally got her published.
"De Vigan projects an air of serenity and order, but her writing is dark – Stephen King dark"
Her first book, Days Without Hunger – which came out under the pseudonym Lou Delvig in 2001 – describes the anorexia de Vigan suffered from at the age of 18, and her recovery process, in searing detail. By the time she wrote the book, she was already talking ‘quite openly’ about the condition, she says.
So why the pseudonym?‘I wasn’t ashamed. But I was working by day at a marketing company at the time and…’ She shrugs. ‘Look: I see it as a very serious accident that occurred to me in transition to adulthood – and it’s a part of me now.’
You don’t have to be a shrink to see why de Vigan might have yearned for control at a point in her life when her mother’s condition was worsening. ‘And anorexia is to do with control, although paradoxically it means a complete loss of control. When you stop feeding yourself you reach a kind of anaesthetised state, so actually it works like a drug. Only this drug costs nothing and is easy available – and like the drug addict you’ll keep insisting that you are in control when in fact it’s this obscure auto-destructive force within you exerting its power.’
Based on a True Story by Delphine de Vigan
Based on a True Story by Delphine de Vigan
It took de Vigan a year to go from the ‘round young girl’ she was ‘to the skeleton I became’. Eventually she was hospitalised in a state close to death. ‘I spent six months in that hospital bed being fed by a tube. And because of the damage I’d done to myself, it took a while to come back from that – but I never relapsed. I was lucky in that my anorexia was very severe but relatively brief. And it allowed me to grow up and understand things. But at what a price.’
She will forever be grateful that she was able to have children, she says – a daughter, now 21, and son, 18, who, like everything else in her life, have paper alter egos as ‘Louise’ and ‘Paul’ – ‘because the doctors had said it wouldn’t be possible’.
And being a mother, de Vigan says, has helped her grow stronger as a person. ‘Not just because you have to, either.’ The relationship with her children’s father (who she’d rather not name) lasted for 15 years and she has, since 2011, been with presenter François Busnel, who hosts a popular cultural TV show in France.
de Vigan projects an air of serenity and order, but her writing is dark
de Vigan projects an air of serenity and order, but her writing is dark Credit: Victoria Paterno
‘He has been so supportive – as has the father of my children. So I’m lucky to have a life that allows me to stay stable.’
With her wild blonde hair pulled back into a ponytail, her buttoned-up cardigan and her stillness, de Vigan projects an air of serenity and order, but her writing is dark – Stephen King dark – and I wonder whether she ever feels that the stability she’s able to maintain is under threat from within.
‘Genetically, I do think there’s a fragility there,’ she says quietly. ‘I think “it” is in me. And with bipolar disorder, they now know that there is a hereditary factor. But they also know that circumstances can have a lot to do with it.’
"When you stop feeding yourself you reach a kind of anaesthetised state. It works like a drug"
There’s a passion when de Vigan talks about the mental illness that robbed her of her mother decades before she committed suicide, that’s absent from any other subject we discuss. Even the writing – which she seems to see as more of a compulsion than a deliverance – doesn’t sharpen her features in the same way.
‘Writing is a daily combat,’ she grimaces. ‘A marathon-style endurance test that’s about iron self-discipline more than anything else. You can’t get breathless, and you can’t stop halfway.’ Does it keep the darkness at bay, though, I ask when she tells me about the new novel ‘on loyalty’ she started writing in January? ‘I wouldn’t say that. But being able to make a living out of it does make me incredibly happy.’
Even if, by the pompous and perverse diktats of the French literati, the fact that she does make a living out of it means her work must be ‘popular fiction’ rather than art? ‘Oh, if your books are popular here,’ she laughs, ‘it means you’ve made concessions for the great unwashed public. I can’t really complain because the critics have been kind to me, but in France success is mal vu. Is it like that in England?’
She’s about to find out.
Based on a True Story (Bloomsbury, £12.99) is published on 6 April
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