In 2024, Gisèle Pelicot, then 71 years old, emerged as a global feminist icon after she declined the legal protection of anonymity during her rape trial in France, transforming a private horror into a public reckoning. For more than a decade, her husband had allegedly drugged her, raping her and inviting at least 72 men to do the same. If shame hovers in this story, waiving off her anonymity was a declaration that it was never hers to carry. It belonged to the rapists.On February 17 this year, her memoir, ‘A Hymn to Life’ bearing the same defiant refrain, “Shame has to change sides”, was released. In her own words, Gisèle resists the narrative arc so tidily prepared for women who endure public scrutiny during the rape trials. She does not become a saint or polish her fury into something marketable. Instead, she insists, stubbornly and luminously, on love. For herself.What makes ‘A Hymn to Life’ searing is not only its account of violation but its indictment of the culture that so efficiently digests it. Rape rarely remains focused on the rapist for long. The beam of inquiry swivels, with dreary predictability, toward the woman: What was she wearing? Why didn’t she leave? Why didn’t she know? In court, a lawyer asks Gisèle whether she locked the bathroom door: “You asked for it, Madame Pelicot.” The men who rape her do not lower their eyes; they smirk, confer, perform fraternity. If she smiles, if she wears a new dress, it is marshalled as evidence to “minimise both the trauma and the crime”.The grotesquerie is total. She was drugged in her own home, where the assaults were recorded and circulated on the dark web. However, the images intended to degrade her turned damningly against the perpetrators. Despite this record, the reflex to scrutinise her persists. That the trial was public, she writes, saved her: “On the contrary, I realised that it would have destroyed me if no one had been there to hear it all.”The men who violated her, who treated rape as entitlement, as punishment, as sport, are not aberrations in her telling but products of a culture that trains men to believe they may take and take and take again. The book’s quiet bombshell is that this structure harms men, too; sexual violence is inflicted on men by men at staggering rates. Patriarchy is not a closed circuit but a wildfire.And yet, one of the book’s quiet astonishments is its refusal to caricature. Even her husband, Dominique, despite his monstrosity finds a humanising portrayal whose professional and personal failures curdled into resentment and ruin. Gisèle’s bravery lies not merely in holding him accountable but in refusing to be humiliated by his inadequacies. “I partitioned Dominique into two,” she writes, “the same way I somehow managed to separate my violated body from my sense of self.”For readers who have bristled at the term ‘feminism’, dismissing it as strident or ill-fitting, ‘A Hymn to Life’ offers a gentle but unyielding rejoinder. Feminism here is not posture but premise: your “no” requires no footnote. It is the refusal to perform sexual acts you do not wish to perform. It is the audacity to build communities beyond your male partner. “I underestimated the importance of [female] friendship,” she declares. Outside the courthouse, women gather for her support. If the perpetrators bond in denial, women assemble in witness. Gisèle writes of the friend who once tried to warn her, of a 25-year-old woman in tears, whispering that she could never be so brave. “It was that young woman — her terror, her youth — I was thinking of when I addressed the court midway through the trial,” she recalls. The memoir’s gaze continually widens, shifting from self to sisterhood.When the media anoints dignity as her defining trait, Gisèle gently resists the coronation: it is perfectly acceptable to collapse. Strength, she suggests, is not the absence of breakdown but the refusal of shame. That refusal extends to others. She withholds judgment against Madame Maréchal, who declines to press charges against her husband and Dominique for committing the same crime with her. She does not impose her version of courage on every woman. Regarding other crimes that orbit her story, the rape and death of Sophie Narme, the abuse of her daughter, Caroline, and grandson, Nathan, she insists on waiting for facts, protecting “the few illusions” she has left without contesting the legitimacy of their narratives. It is a testament not to a single script of survival but to the uneasy coexistence of vulnerability and resistance for each victim without reducing them to objects of pity or submission.It would be easy to flatten ‘A Hymn to Life’ into a manifesto about rape culture. Gisèle resists that flattening with a ferocity by telling a story of who she is beyond a victim. Hope, in Gisèle’s rendering, is not naiveté but defiance. To hope in a situation designed to extinguish hope is not weakness but revolt: “I still have faith in people. Once that was my greatest weakness. Now it is my strength.”She does not give up on her friends, on her life, or on herself, on love and on men in her life. She writes tenderly of her father and brother permanently unmoored by her mother’s death, of the male guard who first caught Dominique upskirting a woman, of lawyers who fought fiercely for her while allowing her space to collapse, of Jean Loup who returned love to her life, who left the courtroom every time the recorded assaults would play because Gisèle made him promise to do that, without asking her to amputate her past to accommodate his comfort. She holds onto her truths with both hands. She lives imperfectly, insistently, alive.What lingers after the final page is not only the horror of the crime, though it is there, nor even the procedural choreography of justice. It is the image of a woman who does not refuse to live her life and love. This is not a hymn in the saccharine sense. It does not deny darkness, it sings in spite of it.— The reviewer is assistant professor at School of Languages and Culture, Amity University Punjab