Le consentement

In her spare, unflinching memoir, French publisher Vanessa Springora returns to the relationship that shaped and scarred her adolescence. At fourteen, lonely and hungry for attention, she was drawn into the orbit of a celebrated writer some thirty-five years her senior — a man whose reputation, charm and literary standing shielded him even as he pursued a sexual relationship with a child.

Springora reconstructs, with clarity and control, the mechanics of that seduction: the letters and looks, the isolation from friends and family, the way an adolescent's longing to be seen was turned into consent she was in no position to give. She also indicts the Parisian literary world that celebrated her abuser and the culture that looked away, and reflects on what it means to finally reclaim her own story from the man who had made her a character in his.

A landmark of contemporary French letters, Le consentement helped force a public reckoning with abuse, power and complicity — a survivor's act of reclamation written in prose as precise as it is devastating.