Author Catherine De Saint Phalle composes thoughtful, meditative, introspective words that come together into works of great insight and profound curiosity, whether it be fiction or non-fiction. THE HURT (Transit Lounge 2026) is a memoir of a transformational time in her life when she was 18 years old, a companion to her previous memoir about (and named for) her parents, POUM AND ALEXANDRE.
THE HURT is ostensibly about a first tentative intimate and romantic relationship with the elusive and mysterious Julien, who she meets at the school she deplores. But as she relates the small interactions with Julien – a picnic, holding hands at the school gate – she deviates into a meandering, intriguing and beguiling narrative about parables, history, the classics, her family and friends, her teachers, education and books, all melted together like a watercolour painting under the ‘jaded old silver of the Parisian sunshine’.
She describes THE HURT as an exploration of her sense of her own presence, which she felt was erased. It’s about despair and intent, as she remembers many aspects of that time, some that ‘didn’t even relate to my hurt’. It’s as if she peers through the prism of her life at 18 and tries to make sense of everything that went before and after. The expression ‘the hurt’ does not, as I first suspected, refer to one traumatic event of her childhood or youth. Instead, it reflects the various feelings of hurt she accumulated throughout her youth and young adulthood as a result of her unusually scattered and eccentric parents, her unconventional upbringing and the vast interiority of her thoughts both at the time (memories) and now (revisiting those recollections and casting a different light over them).
This book is for those who adore beautiful, literary prose, sentences that hold your eye for longer than necessary, phrases that appear like peeks of sunshine from behind clouds, pages and pages of gorgeous, deliberate, whimsical story bound into a slim volume of combined memoir, dreams, fantasies, childhood fears, with the wisdom of age applied to parse meaning from what was previously unknown or misunderstood.
Moments of humour, passion, anger, confusion, tenderness, warmth and joy punctuate this narrative.
One of my favourite phrases is: ‘Some [metaphorical] murders happen in the ether. There may be no blood, but negating someone is a killing all the same.’ This is a story of negation, of invisibility, of being seen or unseen.
This is not a dramatic book; indeed, some might say not much happens. But it is the details, the forensic examination by the author of her younger self, that is this book’s strength. It’s a real-time navigation of a young girl’s experiences and her interpretations of those experiences, set against the wisdom of hindsight that comes with age and living and years. The human condition, in all its messy, captivating, vulnerable, bold and exhilarating honesty.