The Quasi-confessional Autobiography: Mort d'un silence, by Clémence Boulouque

Jane E. Evans, University of Texas at El Paso

Abstract

Since 2003, when Clémence Boulouque's memoir, Mort d'un silence, was published, its author has written in a variety of genres, including novels, articles, and film scripts. Mort d'un silence, her first autobiographical work, interests the reader for several reasons: it revisits Judge Gilles Boulouque's suicide in December 1990 and the consequences of this act for his family, especially his thirteen-year-old daughter, Clémence; it recalls the political climate in France during the late 1980s, when Gilles Boulouque had already begun to fight terrorism; and it illustrates the tension between disclosure and concealment as its twenty-six-year-old narrator describes her passage from childhood to adulthood following her father's death.