Raw - by Clarisse Griffon Du Bellay (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

A French sculptor transfigures her family's long-protected secret into art

In 1816, the French naval ship Medusa ran aground off the coast of Senegal. Some of the officers and crew escaped on lifeboats, but nearly 150 of its passengers were forced to board an improvised raft. The raft remained adrift for thirteen terrifying days of delirium, chaos, murder, and cannibalism. Only fifteen men survived.

Clarisse Griffon du Bellay's ancestor was among those survivors, and his annotated version of the officially published account told a very different story from the surviving officers' tale of heroism in which they credited themselves with preserving as many lives as possible.

This annotated book was passed from eldest son to eldest son and kept hidden for generations until Griffon du Bellay received scanned pages from her father. As the inherited nightmare of its contents invaded her dreams, she began carving monumental sculptures in oak and beechwood, but that wasn't enough to release her from "The vertigo of knowing that your blood is born of this. That you are made of this, that you would have done the same thing." For that, she needed to write Raw.

Review Quotes

"What a stunning, stylistically refreshing meditation on the heritability of trauma and the beguiling ways in which its aftereffects manifest in our bodies, our obsessions, our dreams, our silence, and our desires. Raw serves as a testament--a brilliantly written one, at that--to the power of art and art-making as a contextualizing agent for the otherwise inapprehensible. Clarisse Griffon du Bellay reforges and reshapes her node on the continuum of transgenerational identity, an act that is at once urgently life-affirming and wildly irreverent in its audacity." --Matthew Gavin Frank, author of Flight of the Diamond Smugglers and Submersed

"Beautiful, unique. . . . Visceral prose, both pure and raw." --Le Nouvel Obs magazine

"A family investigation unlike any other." --Marianne magazine

About the Author

Clarisse Griffon du Bellay is an artist and writer who specializes in sculpture and wood carving. She is the recipient of the ArtCheval Public Prize and the Georges Coulon Prize from the Institut de France, and has completed two prestigious residencies affiliated with the Académie des Beaux-Arts at La Villa Dufraine in France and Casa de Velázquez in Madrid. Raw: Shipwreck, Secrets, and the Afterlife of an Infamous Family History is her first book. She lives in Nemours, France.