Delphine de Vigan; translated by George Miller
Nothing Holds Back the Night by Delphine de Vigan, translated from the French by George Miller, hovers between fiction, memoir, and a biography of de Vigan’s mother. It opens with the shocking scene of the author discovering her mother’s corpse, the result of an apparent suicide.
To understand her mother and the reasons for the suicide, de Vigan embarks on a project to write her mother’s biography. She combs through her mother’s papers, conducts interviews with the surviving members of the family, reads diaries, scrutinizes photographs, and watches old videos to piece together her mother’s childhood. This section is as much a portrait of a family as it is a portrait of de Vigan’s mother. The author tries to reconstruct her mother’s childhood environment, growing up in a rambunctious home with Bohemian parents and eight siblings. She imagines and embellishes scenes and conversations, attributing thoughts, feelings, and motivations to individuals. This section is fictional in approach with the author describing the childhood of her mother, aunts, and uncles as if they are characters in a novel.
The second part of the book shifts in tone as the author describes first-hand experience with her mother. She includes her sister’s recollections and conversations and the experiences they shared. She provides a litany of her mother’s failures, short-comings, and struggles: failure to be a responsible and responsive parent; an addiction to drugs and alcohol; a divorce; multiple lovers; erratic mood swings; manic episodes; hallucinations; mental illness; diagnosis of bi-polar disorder; repeated stays at various mental institutions; a complete breakdown in which she tries to stick needles in her daughter’s eyes; and cancer. The author also describes periods of stability in her mother’s life when she is on her medication.
Threaded throughout this part biography, part memoir, part fiction are whole sections in which the author engages in self-examination. She expresses her anxiety about conveying an accurate portrait of her mother. She has doubts about completing the project, stops in the middle of describing a situation to pose questions to herself as if groping to find answers that are just out of reach. The work is replete with the author’s introspective self-doubts, with her struggle to understand, and with the burden of responsibility she feels to do justice to her mother’s memory.
What emerges from this dark, gripping book is a daughter’s portrait of a mother who is beautiful, mysterious, introspective, tortured, distant, and courageous—a mother who suffered childhood traumas, including a possible sexual assault that may have triggered her mental instability. What also emerges is the love the author feels for her mother and the respect she has for her mother’s courageous battles with her inner demons.