How do you mourn an abusive alcoholic parent? French writer Anne Pauly’s Before I Forget, translated by Dina Leifer, addresses this question in a deeply personal account of grief.
We accompany Pauly’s protagonist and narrator, Anne, as she cares for her ailing father, looking after his house and his personal grooming. Having grown up witnessing her father’s recurrent violence towards her mother, Pauly addresses some very serious topics. She expresses anger towards people who cannot understand why victims of domestic abuse don’t simply leave, saying:
“I’d like to see you, on a Sunday evening, your eye black and blue and your nightshirt torn, hurriedly pack a case for a strip-lit emergency refuge. I’d like to see you, bombarded by insults and threats, find the energy to run to the station with your children and get on a train, not knowing whether you can ever come back.”
In the present, this giant who would chase Anne’s mother around the kitchen table or lock his family out of their home in a drunken rage has been reduced to a sunken form in a wheelchair. These two versions of him co-exist in the narrative.
We are invited to listen to her father’s recollection of Anne’s childhood – which was a “different time” when...