A Memoir of Passage: Mort d'un silence, by Clémence Boulouque

Jane E. Evans, University of Texas at El Paso

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Copyright 2009 by Women in French Studies. Women in French is a member of the Council of Editors of Learned Journals and an Allied Organization of the Modern Language Association of America.

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 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 adolescence and from young to more mature adulthood.