The Gift

The Gift vividly portrays the outer life and inner torment of a woman's struggle to come to terms with her experience of childhood sexual abuse. A 40-year-old memory is still very much alive, and she revisits it here with immediacy, suspense, irony and even humor. While this memoir takes place in France, it addresses universal questions about the role and status of women and girls within the family, and in society at large. Marie Depeyre illustrates the power and the importance...
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The Gift vividly portrays the outer life and inner torment of a woman's struggle to come to terms with her experience of childhood sexual abuse. A 40-year-old memory is still very much alive, and she revisits it here with immediacy, suspense, irony and even humor. While this memoir takes place in France, it addresses universal questions about the role and status of women and girls within the family, and in society at large.
Marie Depeyre illustrates the power and the importance of personal storytelling -- the therapeutic value of courageously bearing witness to one's own experience, which she describes as the act of "Rolling out sentences, as if unrolling a carpet to discover its pattern...extracting the stains and beauty from it in order to move forward with plans for the future."