On 17 February 2026, Et la joie de vivre, the memoir of Gisèle Pelicot, is published. In Spanish, it appears as Un himno a la vida and in English as A Hymn to Life: Shame Has to Change Sides. At the center of this release, there is no marketing spectacle, but a woman who refuses to be reduced to the violence she endured.
Sexual violence not only destroys bodies; it attempts to confiscate identities. It tries to turn the survivor into a case file, a label, a fixed symbol. Gisèle Pelicot’s book stands against that logic. Publishing Et la joie de vivre is not an editorial strategy; it is a way of preventing her life from being written solely by the crime committed against her.
During the judicial proceedings, her name was pronounced thousands of times. Now she is the one who pronounces it. “Throughout the entire process, I was labeled a victim. Today I no longer want that status,” she has declared at the time of the book’s release. The sentence does not deny the harm; it defines its limits. The harm occurred. It does not define her.
Et la joie de vivre, published in French by Flammarion and written with the novelist Judith Perrignon, reconstructs Pelicot’s full biography: her childhood, her family life, the years before the discovery of the abuse, and the moment when everything fractured. The English edition, A Hymn to Life: Shame Has to Change Sides, published by Penguin Press, makes explicit the ethical principle she defended during the trial: shame must not fall upon the one who survives. In Spanish, Un himno a la vida. Mi historia, published by Lumen, emphasizes the central gesture: my story, not the narrative imposed by others.
In interviews given to European media on the day of the release, Pelicot explained that she did not initially seek to write a book; publishers approached her. She hesitated before accepting. In the end, she understood that putting her experience into words could be useful for others who carry silences and guilt that do not belong to them. She has also insisted that she does not wish to become a permanent icon of suffering. She wants to live.
International critics have read the book as more than a judicial memoir. Reviews in the Anglo-Saxon press underline that the text avoids sensationalism and distances itself from the social script that expects survivors to offer a standardized narrative of collapse or heroic redemption. The Irish Times notes that the work challenges the idea of the “acceptable victim,” while Kirkus Reviews describes it as courageous and deeply moving. It is not a book that seeks pity; it seeks clarity.
The core of this publication, however, does not lie in critical acclaim or the publishing market. It lies in an intimate decision: to confront one’s own history without denying it and without becoming trapped inside it. Resilience, in this context, is not an empty slogan. It is complex inner work that demands radical honesty. It does not mean forgetting; it means integrating what happened into a broader life story in which trauma does not absorb all meaning.
Honesty toward one’s own life requires looking directly at what is unbearable without allowing it to become an absolute identity. It means accepting the fracture while refusing to be defined solely by it. In Pelicot’s case, that honesty takes a public form: speaking, writing, naming. Not to relive the horror, but to place it exactly where it belongs.
Et la joie de vivre is not an ingenuous title. It is a deliberate affirmation that joy—or at least the possibility of a dignified life—does not disappear forever, even when it has been wounded. Resilience, understood in this way, is not passive endurance but active reconstruction. It is the capacity to rewrite one’s own narrative when others have tried to fix it in place.
In a time when media exposure often devours those who endure public tragedy, Gisèle Pelicot’s book represents the opposite gesture: reclaiming the word so that identity is not dictated by crime. That is the true meaning of this publication. Not the chronicle of damage, but the restitution of voice.
