Consent

A Memoir

By: Vanessa Springora, Natasha Lehrer - translator

Narrated by: Anne-Marie Piazza

“Consent is a Molotov cocktail, flung at the face of the French establishment, a work of dazzling, highly controlled fury.... By every conceivable metric, her book is a triumph.” (The New York Times)

Already an international literary sensation, an intimate and powerful memoir of a young French teenage girl’s relationship with a famous, much older male writer - a universal #MeToo story of power, manipulation, trauma, recovery, and resiliency that exposes the hypocrisy of a culture that has allowed the sexual abuse of minors to occur unchecked.

Sometimes, all it takes is a single voice to shatter the silence of complicity.

Thirty years ago, Vanessa Springora was the teenage muse of one of the country’s most celebrated writers, a footnote in the narrative of a very influential man in the French literary world.

At the end of 2019, as women around the world began to speak out, Vanessa, now in her forties and the director of one of France’s leading publishing houses, decided to reclaim her own story, offering her perspective of those events sharply known.

Consent is the story of one precocious young girl’s stolen adolescence. Devastating in its honesty, Vanessa’s painstakingly memoir lays bare the cultural attitudes and circumstances that made it possible for a 13-year-old girl to become involved with a 50-year-old man who happened to be a notable writer. As she recalls the events of her childhood and her seduction by one of her country’s most notable writers, Vanessa reflects on the ways in which this disturbing relationship changed and affected her as she grew older.

Drawing parallels between children’s fairy tales and French history and her personal life, Vanessa offers an intimate and absorbing look at the meaning of love and consent and the toll of trauma and the power of healing in women’s lives. Ultimately, she offers a forceful indictment of a chauvinistic literary world that has for too long accepted and helped perpetuate gender inequality and the exploitation and sexual abuse of children.

Translated from the French by Natasha Lehrer

"...One of the belated truths that emerges from [Consent] is that Springora is a writer. [...]Her sentences gleam like metal; each chapter snaps shut with the clean brutality of a latch." (The New Yorker)

"Consent [is] rapier-sharp, written with restraint, elegance and brevity." (The Times (London)

"[Consent] has something steely in its heart, and it departs from the typical American memoir of childhood abuse in exhilarating ways." (Slate)

"Lucid and nuanced...[Consent] will speak to trauma survivors everywhere." (Los Angeles Review of Books)

”A piercing memoir about the sexually abusive relationship she endured at age 14 with a 50-year-old writer...This chilling account will linger with readers long after the last page is turned.” (Publishers Weekly)

"Springora's lucid account is a commanding discussion of sexual abuse and victimization, and a powerful act of reclamation." (Booklist)

"A chilling story of child abuse and the sophisticated Parisians who looked the other way...[Springora] is an elegant and perceptive writer." (Kirkus)

©2020 Vanessa Springora (P)2020 HarperCollins Publishers

I couldn’t stop to listen

Unfortunately i feel more identity with the story in a personal level, but listening to someone that is able to call it what it is. It is brave.

True fable deeply moving

The NY Times rave of this translation said it all, the author uses her pen like a blade to reclaim herself as subject from the perverted grip of a man she met at 13 and who until very recently was the toast of the French literary world. We have a long way to go but Consent blazes a path with vivid power. This is an important little work.

A masterly crafted & heroic truth

of confronting & contending with a gaslighting narcissist ‘novelist’ protected by the French literati. Bravo, Madame Springora.

A Must Read!

I listened to the whole book in one day. This true story of a young abused teen, seen through the eyes of her grown-up self, is so important. The narrator is excellent, portraying the writer as a whole person rather than a sole victim of abuse. More than an important piece of literature, it is a well-written one.

Every woman should own this book

What makes this masterpiece heart-warming and heartbreaking at the same time is the fact that every woman has heard the exact same words G. used to manipulate and downgrade Vanessa. The feeling of not being allowed to be yourself, of being groomed and trapped is described in a painfully relatable way. Your daughter should read this and so should your son.

Tragic

The story while well written is a true story of a teen terribly abused and is shocking by any standards.