Éliette Abécassis puts the couple on trial in her book “French Divorce”

A butcher’s shop! The divorce between Antoine and Margaux is a real headache for the judge and for the reader. Éliette Abecassis has decided to put the reader in the uncomfortable position of the one who must pass judgment on Solomon… How to make the right decision? The one that will best spare the children, when a couple falls apart and gives testimony to the courts that is as contradictory as it is plausible. No dialogues in this book, just testimonies, letters, minutes in which everyone tells their version of the love story, if there was one, between Antoine, surgeon, and Margaux, novelist . The mother, the father, the brother, the friend, the lover, the publisher, the second wife, the nanny, every time the reader thinks he understands a truth, a new testimony distorts his judgment.

Is she crazy? Is he a manipulative pervert? Who is unfaithful? Who uses children? Who invents? Who is sincere? In this whirlwind of versions, it is difficult to disentangle the true from the false, each and every one is credible and yet everything contradicts itself… A novel which dissects a merciless trial, a broken family, a society which no longer knows what to do with these couples who gut around children. She points to the impossible mission of justice. And yet, there is always something or someone to save amid the ruins of a former love… A novel from which we emerge destabilized.