We read “My real name is Elisabeth”, the book that buzze in bookstores

With its intriguing coverage, its impressive prize list and its story mixing feminism, mental health and family secrets, Adèle Yon’s novel had everything to prick our curiosity. Impossible to resist this event book.

“You are lucky” lets me the bookseller when I hold her last copy of her My real name is Elisabeth, Published last January by subsoil editions and winner of the New Obs Literary Prize (in the running for the Goncourt Prize for the first novel). “Everyone tears it away, it is in reprint, it was sold to 200,000 copies. It is crazy.” Crazy, yes … and comforting. Because this book deals with important subjects such as feminism and psychiatry and imagine that it is found on the bedside tables of so many readers is heartwarming.

A fascinating dive in psychiatry

Adèle Yon, the author, is in the middle of her twenty when she begins to take an interest in the history of her great-grandmother, named Betsy (her real name is Elisabeth). It is that this great-grandmother, which she has never known and which no one speaks in the family, was considered to be “crazy”. And that Adele is sometimes struck down at the idea of ​​becoming crazy too. So she inquires, asks the questions that no one has ever dared to ask, rummage in old photo albums …

As she goes, she discovers that this Betsy was interned in a psychiatric hospital for many years for schizophrenia. That it underwent electroshocs, sakel cures and lobotomy. But were these treatments legitimate? Was Elisabeth really crazy or was she only a little too free and sensitive woman in an era which imposed on her to be only a good mother and a wise wife?

Why this success? Our opinion

The success of this novel is amply justified, already by its original format, between the road trip, the essay and the investigation. The author is a researcher and it is felt in the writing that aims to be rigorous, and in the investigation which is built over the pages. The narrator immerses us with her at the heart of this investigation: here we are, readers, transformed into detectives, traversing with curiosity the transcriptions of the discussions, carefully examining the letters of Betsy and her husband, the medical files and the dusty clichés.

Finally, what about the subject and that he highlights? The question of gender in mental health is a real taboo that the narrator explores seriously and nuances. Did Elisabeth really suffer from schizophrenia? Or was she an expansive woman, “too much”, emotional, tormented, traumatized, discredited by her husband, an authoritarian man, and a womanizer? How many women have suffered the same fate, without ever being able to express it? With this book, Adèle Yon gives a voice to these women deemed different. It also leaves us a bitter taste, which remains for a long time after turning the last page. A dull anger that makes you want to be shared. And to say to all our friends: “You have read My real name is Elisabeth? “”

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