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A Memoir
by Vanessa Springora
Already an international literary sensation, an intimate and powerful memoir of a young French teenage girl's relationship with a famous, much older male writer—a universal #MeToo story of power, manipulation, trauma, recovery, and resiliency that exposes the hypocrisy of a culture that has allowed the sexual abuse of minors to occur unchecked.
Sometimes, all it takes is a single voice to shatter the silence of complicity.
Thirty years ago, Vanessa Springora was the teenage muse of one of the country's most celebrated writers, a footnote in the narrative of a very influential man in the French literary world.
At the end of 2019, as women around the world began to speak out, Vanessa, now in her forties and the director of one of France's leading publishing houses, decided to reclaim her own story, offering her perspective of those events sharply known.
Consent is the story of one precocious young girl's stolen adolescence. Devastating in its honesty, Vanessa's painstakingly memoir lays bare the cultural attitudes and circumstances that made it possible for a thirteen-year-old girl to become involved with a fifty-year-old man who happened to be a notable writer. As she recalls the events of her childhood and her seduction by one of her country's most notable writers, Vanessa reflects on the ways in which this disturbing relationship changed and affected her as she grew older.
Drawing parallels between children's fairy tales and French history and her personal life, Vanessa offers an intimate and absorbing look at the meaning of love and consent and the toll of trauma and the power of healing in women's lives. Ultimately, she offers a forceful indictment of a chauvinistic literary world that has for too long accepted and helped perpetuate gender inequality and the exploitation and sexual abuse of children.
"A piercing memoir about the sexually abusive relationship she endured at age 14 with a 50-year-old writer... . This chilling account will linger with readers long after the last page is turned." —Publishers Weekly
"A fierce account from a woman hoping to wrest her story back. Recommended Reading." —Library Journal
"Springora's lucid account is a commanding discussion of sexual abuse and victimization, and a powerful act of reclamation." —Booklist
"A chilling story of child abuse and the sophisticated Parisians who looked the other way...[Springora] is an elegant and perceptive writer." —Kirkus Reviews
This information about Consent was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Vanessa Springora is a French writer and editor. Consent is her first book.
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