Consent

A Memoir of Stolen Adolescence

Vanessa Springora author

Format:Paperback

Publisher:HarperCollins Publishers

Published:17th Feb '22

£9.99

Available for immediate dispatch.

Consent cover

The devastating and powerful memoir from a French publisher who was abused by a famous writer from the age of thirteen

‘Dazzling’ New York Times ‘A gut-punch of a memoir with prose that cuts like a knife’ Kate Elizabeth Russell, author of My Dark Vanessa

Thirty years ago, Vanessa Springora was the teenage muse of one of France’s most celebrated writers, a footnote in the narrative of an influential man. At the end of 2019, as women around the world began to speak out, Springora, now in her forties and the director of one of France’s leading publishing houses, decided to reclaim her own story.

Consent recalls her stolen adolescence. Devastating in its honesty, Springora’s painstaking memoir lays bare the cultural attitudes and circumstances that made it possible for a fourteen-year-old girl to become involved with a fifty-year-old man.

‘A Molotov cocktail flung at the face of the French establishment, a work of dazzling, highly controlled fury. A triumph’ New York Times

‘A memoir of lost adolescence … elegant, focused, fluidly translated’ Guardian

‘Rapier-sharp, written with restraint, elegance and brevity – and beautifully translated’ The Times

‘A gut-punch of a memoir with prose that cuts like a knife. Springora never loses sight of the teenage girl at the centre of her story even as she lays bare a culture’s hypocrisies and failures. Painful and powerful, Consent reads like a reckoning’ Kate Elizabeth Russell, author of My Dark Vanessa

‘Incisive and brave, Consent examines how society often fails to protect young women in the most dangerous of ways’ Louise O’Neill

‘[Vanessa Springova’s] account makes one of the strongest points yet in the French #MeToo debate’ Los Angeles Review of Books

‘Fierce and controlled … a searing indictment of an overly permissive era that has triggered a national reckoning in France’ Daily Mail

‘Her sentences gleam like metal; each chapter snaps shut with the clean brutality of a latch’ The New Yorker

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

ISBN: 9780008424961

Dimensions: 198mm x 129mm x 16mm

Weight: 190g

208 pages