THE FAMILIA GRANDE

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.