You think I'm an idiot...: Inside the mind of a betrayed woman, Guillaume Clicquot

In short

My name is Orane de Lavallière, and I'm 58 years old. I sacrificed all my degrees to dedicate myself to my family and to my husband Xavier's success. My mission as a stay-at-home mother accomplished, that bastard left me for a younger woman. He took me for a fool, and you too, I presume. I don't blame you, because you're right, it's a mundane story. But I didn't see it coming, lulled by my comfortable life and blinded by the certainties of a naive, uptight bourgeois woman. Xavier destroyed me. I picked myself up. Yet his memory haunts me, his existence gnaws at me. I feel powerless. Unless...

Through this novel, Guillaume Clicquot delves deeply into the damage of betrayal and asks this question: what is crueler? Physical violence or psychological violence? He takes the opportunity to describe the state of a calculating and unscrupulous society, where human beings are useful or they are not. This lucid observation thus highlights volunteers, those who thrive on the well-being they bring to others.

Writer, screenwriter, and short film director, Guillaume Clicquot is above all a comedy author. With this book, he returns to the dark genre that made his first novel "Les fils de" a success.

Message from Guillaume Clicquot

Upon reading the back cover of this novel, some of my loyal readers will say that I am obsessed with the theme of separation. They are not entirely wrong; it is what I fear the most. That being said, this story specifically addresses the violence of betrayal. The greater the love, friendship, trust, and complicity, the more deeply affected the betrayed person is. However, I believe that traitors have no idea of the damage they cause, or worse still, they don't care, thinking that their victims will recover. Since I started writing for a living, I have had to repeatedly overcome the cruelty of these human disillusions. For someone who offers their trust, their memories, their feelings and emotions, their humor and self-deprecation, their strengths and weaknesses, the devastation is colossal, the scars deep, and resilience uncertain. Recently, one of these destructive injustices happened to someone close to me, echoing my own experience. My empathy was therefore complete. I was under the influence of that angry yet hesitant impulse that makes us fantasize about a chivalrous act. I wanted to react on her behalf, to punish her tormentor, before admitting, like her, that I was powerless. So, I questioned this impunity: what is ultimately crueler? Physical violence or psychological violence?

Now that I have confessed all this to you, I ask you to forget me, to forget that I am a man. I now place you in the hands of Orane de Lavallière, 58 years old. Let yourself be carried away by her woman's voice: she has so much to tell...