Nothing Holds Back the Night by Delphine de Vigan

Author:Delphine de Vigan [Vigan, Delphine de]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: 21st Century, Cultural, Domestic, Family Life, Fiction, France, Secrets
ISBN: 9781408825730
Google: 9VMDAAAAQBAJ
Amazon: B00IAMKD1G
Publisher: London : Bloomsbury Circus
Published: 2013-04-15T00:00:00+00:00

My writing, if it lasts, can only be an immense malaise. I renounce life,

I lie down to die.

My daughters are quiet.

After a few pages of painful fragments added one after the other without any apparent coherence, Lucile’s text ends with these words:

We are off to our house in the country. I am with my lover, we are with my father.

I am not affectionate yet I love my friend.

That night I can't sleep , I feel hunted. Forrest is sleeping upstairs.

I get up for a pee, my father is watching me, he gives me a sleeping pill and drags me into his bed.

He raped me while I was asleep, I was sixteen, I have said it.

W riting about your family is undoubtedly the easiest way to fall out with them. Lucile’s brothers and sisters won’t want to read what I have just transcribed nor what I am likely to say about it; I can sense this in the tension around my project now, and my feeling that I am bound to hurt them disturbs me more than anything else. They must be wondering what I am going to do with this, how I shall broach it, how far I am prepared to go. Since I am trying to get closer to Lucile, I cannot leave out the relations she had with her father, or rather that he had with her. It’s my duty to ask the question at least. But the question is not painless.

I’m firing at point-blank range and I know it.

One day I told my sister over lunch how terrified I was after reading Lionel Duroy’s fine book, Le Chagrin, which goes back over his childhood and describes the fundamental, irreparable way his siblings became estranged from him after the publication of a novel he wrote fifteen years earlier, in which he had portrayed them and his parents. Even today, none of them speak to him: he’s a traitor, a pariah.

Is fear enough to make one silent?

Looking rather distressed in front of her croque-monsieur, my sister promised me her unconditional support. ‘You have to see it through,’ she said; ‘don’t leave anything in the shadows.’

★

I left convinced that the only route I could take from where I had reached, from where we had all reached, was this one.

The man I love (and who I have come to believe loves me too) is getting worried at seeing me lose more sleep the further I go with this book. I try to explain that it’s normal (and nothing to do with the fact that I have got lost in an experiment in a new genre; nothing to do with the material I am dealing with; this has happened to me with other books that were pure fiction and so on). I tough it out, wave aside his concerns.

Is fear enough to make one silent?

At the age of thirty-two, Lucile wrote that her father had raped her. She sent the text to her parents and her siblings, she gave it to us to read.

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