Synopses & Reviews
Only a teenager when Delphine was born, Lucile raised two daughters largely alone. She was a former child model from a Bohemian family, younger and more glamorous than the other mothers: always in lipstick, wayward and wonderful. But as Delphine grew up, Luciles occasional sadness gave way to overwhelming despair and delusion. She became convinced she was telepathic and in control of the Paris metro system; she gave away all her money; she was hospitalized, medicated, and released in a kind of trance. Young Delphine was left to wonder: What changed her, or what shaped her all along?
In this brilliant investigation into her own family history, Delphine de Vigan attempts to “write her mother,” seeking out something essential as she interviews aging relatives, listens to recordings, and reads Luciles own writings. It is a history of luminous beauty and rambunctious joy, of dark secrets and silences. There are untimely deaths and failures of memory. There are revelations and there is the ultimately unknowable. And in the face of the unknowable, personal history becomes fiction: De Vigan must choose from differing accounts and fill in important gaps, using her writers imagination to reconstruct a life.
De Vigan writes her most expansive novel yet with acute self-awareness and marvelous sympathy. Nothing Holds Back the Night is a remarkable work, universally recognizable and singularly heartbreaking.
Synopsis
Delphine de Vigan mines her personal history in this novel about her mercurial mother—in the wake of her suicide.
Synopsis
Delphine de Vigan, author of the celebrated Underground Time, returns with her most personal and expansive novel yet: the story of three generations of women, damaged and devoted; the ways in which mothers and daughters nurture each other; and the longevity of trauma and love
Synopsis
Delphine is a writer, an accomplished novelist, but she has yet to write the story that pulses most strongly within her: the story of her own family history. She begins with her mother, Lucile, born to a sparkling, idiosyncratic mother and a father who, though often loving, occasionally becomes dangerous, and expresses his love in damaging ways. After the death of two brothers, Lucile leaves home and, still a teenager, soon gives birth to to a daughter, Delphine. Young Delphine has troubles of her own, but is often forced to care for Lucile, still young herself and always marked by tragedy. Both women will struggle to create the lives they want, and finally to take control of the lives they have, each in the way that she knows how. Nothing Can Hold Back the Night moves deftly between lives and time periods, rich with echoes and gradual revelations, new finds in the present shedding new light on the past. Delphine de Vigan writes her most expansive novel yet with acute self-awareness and marvelous sympathy, investing her book with moral complexity and emotional depth. Singularly heartbreaking but universally relatable, it's the finest work to date of a novelist on the rise.
About the Author
Delphine de Vigan is the author of several novels, two of them available in English: No and Me, awarded the 2008 Prix des Libraires (Booksellers Prize), and Underground Time, shortlisted for the 2009 Prix Goncourt. Nothing Holds Back the Night has sold over half a million copies in France, and is being translated into more than 25 languages. De Vigan lives in Paris.