The Familia Grande: A Memoir

by Camille Kouchner, Adriana Hunter (Translator)

Overview

A stunning story about finding the courage to speak out against injustice, even when committed by those closest to us.

Camille Kouchner’s childhood was marked by sun-drenched summers in the south of France, where a vibrant cast of family and friends would gather at their Sanary-sur-Mer house. This familia grande, which included much of the country’s elite, spent memorable days and nights laughing, debating, drinking, and dancing. But a long-held secret poisoned Camille’s memories.
    In February 2017, Camille returned to Sanary at forty-one to bury her mother, who died with none of her five children present. Her passing would stir up old emotions, ultimately leading Camille to publicly confront the truth.
  The Familia Grande poignantly explores the dynamics of abuse, and the questions of guilt and shame surrounding it. Published in France in 2021, the book sparked an important conversation about incest, and the attitudes and laws that have so often allowed influential men to evade consequences for their crimes. 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781635422139
Publisher:	Other Press, LLC
Publication date:	05/17/2022
Sold by:	Penguin Random House Publisher Services
Format:	eBook
Pages:	208
File size:	799 KB

About the Author

Camille Kouchner was born in 1975 in Paris. She is a senior lecturer at the University of Paris with a specialization in labor law. The Familia Grande is her English-language debut.

Adriana Hunter studied French and Drama at the University of London. She has translated more than ninety books, including Marc Petitjean’s The Heart: Frida Kahlo in Paris and Hervé Le Tellier’s The Anomaly and Eléctrico W, winner of the French-American Foundation’s 2013 Translation Prize in Fiction. She lives in Kent, England.

Editorial Reviews

A book whose tale of incest and abuse is also the unsparing portrait of a prominent French family…breathtaking…powerful.” —New York Times

“Free of voyeurism and elegantly written, The Familia Grande is…an artistic success.” —New York Times Book Review

“[Kouchner’s] memoir…sent shock waves into the heart of the French establishment…Her style is raw, breathless; she doesn’t pull any punches.” —The Guardian

“[A] moving, elegantly written memoir…A cathartic, blisteringly candid family portrait of abuse, dysfunction, and eventual epiphany.” —Kirkus Reviews

“Kouchner risks it all by confronting the truth about her family and her stepfather’s abuse…[She] writes in poetically short sentences, paragraphs, and chapters, helping to soften the raw and difficult subject matter.” —Booklist

“Powerful…[Kouchner] paints a vivid picture of life growing up in a family of champagne socialists.” —Sunday Times (UK)

“[Kouchner] blaz[es] a trail with words, without a single superfluous sentence. The Familia Grande is a shocking account of the mechanisms of control and stifled speech, but above all a poignant and posthumous declaration of love to [her] mother.” —France-Amérique

“Camille Kouchner’s chilling memoir brings to light the incredible violence embedded in the discourse of sexual freedom (as happy, transparent, and consensual) that flourished in a certain segment of French society since the 1970s. Her book, however, also offers us a beautiful reflection on transgenerational trauma, as Kouchner recounts her struggle to prevent the transmission of abuse, silence, and shame, literally but also metaphorically.” —Camille Robcis, author of Disalienation: Politics, Philosophy, and Radical Psychiatry in Postwar France

“The Familia Grande is an artfully written, illuminating, and haunting memoir, reminiscent of Kathryn Harrison’s The Kiss. Camille Kouchner dared to break the silence of her life, and by doing so has created a memorable and moving masterpiece.” —Chloe Caldwell, author of The Red Zone: A Love Story

“A lucid, universal account of the unspeakable…extraordinarily powerful and emotional.” —Elle (France)

From the Publisher

2022-03-29
A Frenchwoman reflects on the familial abuse she witnessed and suppressed for years.

Kouchner’s moving, elegantly written memoir begins in 2017 with the unexpected death of her mother, Évelyne, with whom she’d been estranged. Though none of Évelyne’s five children were by her side when she died, they were reunited at the hospital, looking like a “slightly decrepit but reformed rock group.” The author chronicles her affluent upbringing, providing intriguing details about her father, Bernard, a diplomat, and free-spirited Évelyne, a feminist intellectual and political scientist who, in the 1960s, had a romance with Fidel Castro. Kouchner, a lecturer at the University of Paris, describes the bourgeoisie milieu of her large extended family, which also encompassed political dignitaries, and their carefree attitudes toward nudity, libertarianism, and a variety of social and cultural issues. The author is distinctly cleareyed when chronicling her family’s mental deterioration after the suicides of her grandparents. She is equally lucid in her depiction of her mother’s remarriage to her (unnamed) stepfather, a high-profile French intellectual and “combination of Michel Berger and Eddy Mitchell.” At their family home, he emerged as a rambunctious yet beloved and kind “constitutionalist.” However, his relationships to his stepchildren carried murkier undertones. In graphic chapters, Kouchner details the sexual abuse her twin brother endured at age 14, and she writes poignantly about how the suppressed guilt, “begat by lies” and shame she felt, bled into her adulthood and became “a new twinhood.” The secrecy clouded new relationships, while her brother, who went on to have “a truly brilliant career,” still suffered. “Over the slow process of rebuilding themselves, victims continue to believe they’re guilty for a long time,” writes Kouchner, “a classic process that I instinctively grasped and understood.” When she and her brother publicly broke their silence, the ensuing explosive ordeal scandalized French society enough to inspire new legislation on incest and rape.

A cathartic, blisteringly candid family portrait of abuse, dysfunction, and eventual epiphany.

Kirkus Reviews