As Adèle Yon​ tells it in Mon vrai nom est Elisabeth, when she was eighteen she went to a party, taking with her a bag of weed. A distant cousin who was also at the party made a beeline for her, or for her stash (the two young women hadn’t spoken before). She shared it and left what remained when she went home. Somehow news of this encounter reached her grandparents, giving them the impression that she was a drug dealer. She reassured them as best she could – but when she visited them that summer, they spoke to her on the subject, warning her that there was a history of mental illness in the family, and that she was just at the time of life when taking drugs tended to bring such things on.

She already knew something of the family history, from a memory passed on by her own father. As a teenager, he had been woken in the middle of the night by his grandmother Betsy striking the wall that separated their rooms in the family holiday house with an iron, and shouting that he was – impossibly – spying on her naked. Elisabeth, known as Betsy, who was born in 1916 and died in 1990, features in the book as the object of an act of restitution, overriding a long familial amnesia. The title is a little rhetorical, since Elisabeth was known as Betsy almost from birth. Making her formal name the title of the book gives the phrase the character of a declaration, a setting straight of the record, but the original context is different. She writes in a letter to her fiancé, André, after signing herself Betsy, ‘Savez-vous que mon vrai nom est Elisabeth?’ This isn’t a protest but something closer to flirtation: she is savouring the paradoxical intimacy that comes with revealing a given name that nobody uses.

Adèle Yon, born in 1994, is a professional researcher who is a graduate in film studies of the École normale supérieure and also works as a chef. It’s pleasing that the French verb cuisiner, used when she questions her grandmother, has such a close equivalent in the English word ‘grill’. She is both hindered and helped by her large and long-lived family (Betsy had ten siblings and six children), most of whom resist discussing painful episodes but provide powerful testimony when persuaded to talk. The only direct traces of Betsy in the book are the letters she wrote during her engagement to André, but her descendant has been able to reconstruct the way she was disowned and victimised by her kin.

The book is laid out in two formats, one standard and the other mimicking typescript and omitting page numbers. Different protocols come into play, with the more formal, recorded interviews being presented in the dossier with assigned speakers in the manner of a play, preceded by a date and sometimes a place. Yon refers to her interviewees not by name but by descriptive phrases in upper case such as ‘OLDEST DAUGHTER’ (denoting her grandmother), followed by a parenthesis, if one is needed, to establish the person’s relationship with Elisabeth. So for instance Adèle’s father, simply ‘my father’ in the sections with a standard layout, becomes ‘CELUI QUI LA REGARDE NUE À TRAVERS LES MURS (UN PETIT-FILS)’ – THE ONE WHO WATCHES HER NAKED THROUGH THE WALLS (A GRANDSON). Such elaborate formulas precede every line of quoted dialogue. It’s not clear what is gained by using these discordant typographical styles.

The large family functions as a chorus, offering a wide range of responses to Yon’s investigations. One great-aunt dissociates herself from the project. That this is not indifference but traumatised recoil is suggested by her place (second) in the family order. It was after her birth that Betsy’s behaviour became troubling, and perhaps she felt a misplaced guilt. Predictably, some family members want to let sleeping dogs lie. What’s the benefit of excavating ancient pain? One relative decries Freudianism on the familiar basis that its inventor was a charlatan, another uses the more unusual rationale that it looks in the wrong place, since damage is registered by the body and not the mind. This is the point of view of BLANCHE-NEIGE or SNOW WHITE (A GREAT-GRANDDAUGHTER), by profession a psychotherapist specialising in trauma. Addressing physical symptoms can lead to recovery without the subject needing to remember anything at all, as Snow White found when she consulted a kinesiologist while pregnant with her second child. Yon’s grandmother has a more ambiguous attitude, not explicitly encouraging her but dropping hints, while her husband volunteers helpful details. At one point she admits to using her granddaughter as a proxy, in a way that allows for possible retreat if the discoveries are too painful.

As a young woman Betsy was so popular that her younger sister Marie took to sniffing the hats of gentleman visitors in the hall to work out who was paying court that evening. Betsy chose André, and is described as putting her hooks into him (‘mettre le grappin’). André’s parents weren’t keen, but she outmanoeuvred them, despite the difficulties of a wartime wedding. When Betsy’s sister Agathe later wanted to marry André’s brother Pierre her parents intervened to end the relationship, concerned by Agathe’s dark moods, which were reminiscent of Betsy’s. Both André and Pierre were quite rigid characters who served in the military. An inherent imbalance meant the match wouldn’t prosper (in another version of the story, André warned Pierre off). Married to someone more accommodating, Agathe had a happy domestic life.

André seems to have regarded marriage as a step towards his ultimate goal of sainthood, whereas Betsy warned him that she would need a lot of freedom within their union. It’s as if they read in each other’s letters only what they wanted to see. In one of her courtship letters Betsy tells André that if he is attracted to other women once they are married he doesn’t need to tell her. She goes on to reassure him that she won’t be tempted by other men, though of course you never know. The only exception would be if she and André didn’t have children and the maternal instinct (which, as she had told him, is less developed in her than in most young women) suddenly became strong – would he help her, in those circumstances? Not that there would be any danger, she would always be faithful. These are not only mixed messages but disordered thoughts, at some distance from the sweet nothings of lovers’ correspondence.

The letters are from 1940, and the wedding took place that same year. Betsy forced the issue by making her way, unaccompanied and with her wedding dress under her arm, to the château owned by some people called Orsini where André’s family was staying. The wedding went ahead, despite a fire caused by an electric iron being left on top of the dress. The couple’s first child was born in 1941. Betsy’s early married life was played out in wartime, and largely in shared accommodation. A lack of privacy can be an ordeal in itself, even to those who set no particular value on freedom of action – certainly Betsy did all she could to isolate herself towards the end of her second pregnancy. This was when the couple’s incompatibility became glaring. They moved back in with Betsy’s parents and her ten siblings in 1943. At different times it’s suggested that she was overburdened with childcare and that she was prevented from looking after her own children. Yon’s book doesn’t really consider whether these alternations of extremes aggravated Betsy’s breakdown – or her rebellion against patriarchal constraints, if that’s what it was.

Of the four supposedly curative assaults on Betsy’s personhood, the first, electric shock treatment, took place in 1943. It seems extraordinary that the mental balance of a bourgeois housewife in wartime should be felt to warrant ECT, however manifest her distress. Her condition didn’t improve and in 1949 she was given the Sakel cure, a series of comas induced by administering high doses of insulin. In 1950 she was lobotomised. The first lobotomy – then known as leucotomy – had been performed in 1935 by the Portuguese neurologist António Egas Moniz, the subject (to use a neutral word) being a depressed prostitute in her sixties who had been committed to an asylum. He made incisions on each side of her skull and then used an alcohol solution to dissolve the white fibres connecting the frontal lobe to the thalamus. Later he devised an instrument he called the leucotome, which enabled more precise severing of tissue (the procedure gained him a share in the 1949 Nobel Prize for medicine). A psychiatrist called Walter Freeman popularised the procedure in America. Not a surgeon, he had to work with someone more qualified, until he realised that the leucotome could be replaced with a small ice pick, while a series of electric shocks could take the place of sedation. Transorbital lobotomy didn’t require a medical team. Freeman gained access to the brain through the top of the eye socket. The obscenity of the procedure, so evident to us now, was that it spared the integrity of the skull by scrambling the brain that the skull was there to protect. Freeman took the show on the road in his ‘lobotomobile’ camper van, offering cheap rates ($25 a pop) and apparently competing with himself to rack up the numbers, performing 25 lobotomies in Cherokee, Iowa on 8 August 1946.

The twenty pages or so that Yon devotes to Freeman’s career have no direct connection to the family story. Transorbital lobotomy was an American phenomenon, never legal in France. Perhaps the subject is irresistible from an archivist’s point of view because so floridly documented: this was an essentially public atrocity, somehow both craze and crusade. The caption of one of Freeman’s post-operative photographs makes Yon’s point for her: ‘Fig. 24. Case 18. Patient one year after operation. She was indolent and euphoric, and subject to convulsive seizures, but she made no complaints.’ What was being shut down was not (predominantly female) misery but the voicing of it. Yon is unable to determine where the lobotomy on Betsy was carried out but identifies the doctor responsible as Marcel David. This authorises her, with an exaggeration most will forgive, to link his name with Freeman’s as two mobile men immobilising women who made the mistake of not knowing their place.

In the book’s most startling passage Yon breaks off her researches and goes back to kitchen work, revelling in her expertise in dismembering a pig carcass. Something that used to take her two hours can now be done in twenty minutes. All her concentration is in her hands – they go on moving at night under the bedclothes. She doesn’t need to use her eyes to guide the boning knife between layers of tissue. She finds herself reluctantly identifying with the surgeons who performed the lobotomy on Betsy, asking herself what they heard while they worked, what resistance their blade encountered. Did they sweat, as she does in a restaurant kitchen in Marseille? Does a lobotomy have a smell? This is a highly contrived literary effect, but that doesn’t take away from its power.

In the event Betsy wasn’t sufficiently pacified by the blade, and André persuaded her to enter an asylum in 1951, at first on a voluntary basis and then not. She was diagnosed as schizophrenic and stayed there for almost seventeen years. She was presumably released on the basis of some sort of recovery, but little or nothing had been done to bring such a thing about. There’s a vague reference to medication, but a new and more enlightened doctor, coupled with a shift in public policy, seems at least partly responsible for her discharge. From 1967 Betsy lived with her parents except for two or three weeks spent in the family’s holiday home every summer, when she would in her own bewildered way try to claim her husband. His response – ‘Fous-moi la paix’ (leave me alone) – was unambiguous. The family weren’t heartless enough to give her a mean nickname, though they did refer to the robot pool cleaner as ‘la Grand-Mère’, on account of Betsy’s wild arm movements when she swam. Her nickname as a young woman had been ‘Tanagra’, in tribute to her grace and elegance.

Betsy died before Yon was born, but it’s not hard to see her academic thesis about women haunted by ghostly doubles – Jane Eyre by the animalistic first Mrs Rochester, the second Mrs de Winter shown up from beyond the grave by the first – as being prompted by the family wraith, whose presence, by virtue of never having been acknowledged, could never be dispelled. Her argument is that the phantom of an uncontrollable woman, conjured up by men’s insecurity and designed to frighten women into conformist roles, becomes an ambiguous object of fascination in its own right, seductive as well as alarming.

So far​ I’ve been discussing the book chosen by the readers of Elle to receive its prize for non-fiction, but Mon vrai nom est Elisabeth is described on its back cover as a novel. (It has been acquired by Fitzcarraldo for publication in the UK, where it will appear as non-fiction.) The blurb proposes a ‘narratrice’ distinct from the author, a distinction the text does all it can to erase. If there were a single respect in which the narratrice differed from the writer with her identical CV the experience of reading the book would be different. These days the designation ‘roman’ seems applicable in France to almost any piece of writing. Are fiction and non-fiction really only flags of convenience? Each category is weakened by the desire to have it both ways. There’s no hint given about how much of Yon’s book is made up but the moment an element of invention is acknowledged it looks rather different. Can we at least say that non-fiction can be falsified, proven wrong on a point of fact, while fiction is immune? The realism of Lord of the Flies suffers from the implausibility of Piggy’s spectacles being used to start a fire, but its imaginative force is intact. A real-life story of survival would be a laughing stock after the discovery of such a mistake.

If this is a novel then readers are allowed to think that certain elements, particularly literary references, seem pat. In 1942 André, in one of a series of diary entries, mentions reading Rebecca in translation, admiring the artistry with which it is written. It’s odd for such an earnest character, if he’s going to take a break from Bible study, to favour Daphne du Maurier. Then there’s the relative who has never read The Hound of the Baskervilles but somehow intuits its relevance to family history: the made-up fear (phosphorescent dog, gene for mental illness) working to mask a banal crime, the murder plot against a family (in the book) or the callous putting away of an inconvenient wife.

The foregrounding of research protocols and the grid of factuality laid over the material could almost be designed to discourage the reader from asking basic questions. The book circles, helplessly it seems, round the house fire before Betsy and André’s wedding, which in novelistic terms should be highly dramatic. Just such a conflagration, after all, provides the climax of both Jane Eyre and Rebecca. A woman who arrives unexpectedly carrying a wedding dress is clearly keen on getting married. A woman who sets fire to that wedding dress and burns down the house where the ceremony is due to take place is significantly more conflicted. As first presented in the book, in the form of a newspaper item, the culprit was a maid, but Betsy is later revealed to have been responsible. She insisted on ironing her wedding dress herself, rather than trust a servant with the job, and then wandered off, leaving it under the iron. Unless faulty wiring is involved (no suggestion of that), I struggle with the idea of a neglected iron causing a catastrophic house fire in a château in the Dordogne in 1940.

If this is a novel, it’s the reader’s prerogative to find the episode botched in terms of drama. If it’s non-fiction, then the author has shied away from the fierce collision of impulses here, the determination to get married and the destruction of the wedding dress (and the house itself). The conflagration may not be testimony, but it’s evidence of a kind, signalling extremes of eagerness and refusal. Yon’s book doesn’t succeed in either passing it off as accidental or accepting what it would mean for it to be deliberate.

She doesn’t scrutinise the discrepancy between accounts, leaving the reader to guess that André’s family was influential enough to cover up Betsy’s responsibility for the fire in the local paper. The only surviving eyewitness is a sister of André’s, who was fourteen at the time, but her account chimes with the newspaper item in regard to the time the fire broke out (7 p.m.) and the extensive damage done. When the water supply ran out the firemen could do nothing and the château was reduced to a pile of rubble (‘un monceau de décombres’). Yon adds the detail that the fire started high up in the building. She remembers that André had arrived unexpectedly only a few days before Betsy (he had been wounded a month or two earlier) and assumes that they had arranged this between them. If you don’t want to get married, why turn up without your family to make it happen in a sort of semi-elopement? If you do, why act out so disastrously towards a symbolic garment? It’s hard to claim these actions as wholly sane. Considering the feats of documentary retrieval that Yon manages elsewhere, it’s odd that she makes no mention of a marriage licence, which might make clear that there was some romantic collusion. Perhaps French paperwork was more flexible than its English equivalent, so that lives could be legally joined without much notice or fuss.

There’s no speculation about the strangeness of this powerful family’s decision to let the ceremony go on after the bride-to-be had ignited the venue, accidentally or otherwise. Betsy’s family wasn’t there to take her part. And for all André’s piety, it’s the Orsinis who could make a claim to sainthood. They didn’t let a little thing like being burned out of their house (having to move to ‘les dépendances’) interfere with their responsibility as hosts to the young couple.

If this is a novel I’m reading, then the passage where a narrator who studied film refers to the pink cheeks (‘les joues roses d’excitation’) of the second Mrs de Winter, played by Joan Fontaine, when she hopes to delight her husband with her outfit for a costume ball, may be hinting at a general unreliability, or at an excessive identification with this particular scene, based on her own romantic history of trying to please negative men. If this is non-fiction, then I can only assume the author has been watching the film in a colourised version.

Yon says that she enjoys it when the archives lose their footing (‘perdent les pédales’), revealing their ‘polyphonie’ and ‘artifice’. Sometimes, though, when the evidence reveals its polyphony and artifice that’s your cue to ask a follow-up question. At times Yon seems keen to neutralise clashes of testimony by separating them widely in the text. Early in the book her grandmother defends her father, saying she will always be grateful to him for not divorcing Betsy and making his children motherless or, worse, giving them another mother. He was faithful to her in his fashion. Having his wife lobotomised and committed seems quite a good way of depriving his children of a mother; Yon’s grandmother, the oldest of the six, was about ten when Betsy was put away. Never mind – André’s fidelity has to count for something. At the other end of the book, three hundred pages later, while Yon and her grandfather are companionably preparing onions, he mentions that when she left the asylum at last Betsy expected to resume family life with André, but her place had been taken by a new woman – well, not so new, since she’d been around for more than fifteen years. So in fact he had embarked on a new relationship within a year or so of Betsy’s committal. Yon’s grandfather had been part of the earlier conversation, but had said nothing to correct his wife’s account. Disconcertingly, her grandmother is revealed, later in the onion-chopping scene, to have heard their conversation from the next room, but she doesn’t elaborate on her definition of fidelity.

Yon’s grandfather praises his wife’s extraordinary ability to forget anything painful, but his temperament is unlike hers. Somehow the past won’t let him alone. He stays at the margins of the book yet gradually establishes himself as the person with the richest relationship with Betsy. It’s remarkable that he should have visited her to tell her he was marrying her daughter, and although it was convenient that the restaurant just outside the asylum gates – Chez Benoît – served an outstanding steak-frites, it wasn’t a comfortable encounter. During the meal Betsy asked no questions except about André. Yon’s grandfather secured permission for her to attend the wedding, although most bridegrooms would rather not invite a mother-in-law who had the indentations left by her lobotomy – as if a fingertip had been inserted – starkly visible on each side of her head. (There’s no mention of how André reacted to her presence.) He treated Betsy as if she was still part of the family that had discarded her.

Early in the book Yon’s grandfather prompted his wife’s memory, supplying the location of the asylum (Fleury-les-Aubrais) where Betsy was detained and suggesting ‘Tubiana’ as the name of the doctor who arranged for her to attend the wedding. It was actually Torrubia, but that’s not too shabby an act of recall after half a century. Near the end of the book (again this arbitrary separation of elements) it’s revealed that Yon’s grandfather worked all his life in the pharmaceutical industry, and so when he talks about the difference made to Betsy’s behaviour by haloperidol – routinely prescribed from the 1960s to manage the symptoms of schizophrenia – he knows what he’s talking about. It’s an odd choice to withhold this information until page 325.

In his conversations with Betsy after she was released he behaved as if she had insight into her own behaviour, asking her why she said certain things. He felt that to some extent she was playing a part, more court jester than crazy lady. She was always trying to embrace André and didn’t understand his resistance, but then no one had told her that she had been replaced in his life. During one meal by the pool, with André absent, she said that she knew what was the matter with him – he had a touch of Aids (‘un petit sida’). Everyone found this very funny. She had devised a cover story to account for her husband’s running away from her, a recoil so intense that when she sneaked into his bed one night he rushed out of the house, slamming the door behind him. Yon’s grandfather says he shouldn’t have treated these exchanges light-heartedly – he would do things differently today. As can happen in families, the one who finds it easiest to express regret is the one with the least to apologise for.

Yon​ ends her book with a narrative sketch of Elisabeth’s life in the form of a single paragraph fourteen pages long, seeking to enter her thoughts though remaining in the first person. This section includes new material, proposing for instance that from earliest childhood Betsy associated sex with fear and violence. Whenever her father came back from the war she would start to cry, knowing that her mother would disappear into the bedroom for hours, not opening the door however much she bawled, disturbed by the groaning and creaking. Obviously there’s no evidence for this dogmatically Freudian scene. Since Betsy was born in August 1916 this would be a very early formulation of traumatic awareness, and it was an unusual bourgeois family of the time that lacked domestic help to distract an infant.

The disaster before the wedding is disposed of in a single offhand phrase (‘The château burns down’) with no reference to ironing, though a possible new motive appears: the wedding dress didn’t symbolise union with André but represented her mother, who had worn it at her own wedding and was now the focus of Betsy’s hostility. Does this help to make the case for her soundness of mind?

There are touches of gothic fantasy in this plenary paragraph, including a dream of Betsy’s in which she is surrounded by her whole family wearing white coats, holding syringes and electric shock generators. There’s also anachronistic language: people in the mid-20th century didn’t talk about genes, nor did they find it reassuring to refer to something being cut out ‘like a cancer’ as if that guaranteed a cure. Admittedly Betsy herself is only part of the subject of Mon vrai nom est Elisabeth, which concerns itself at least as much with the distortions visited on her female bloodline by the fear of breakdown. There are plenty of conflicted attitudes on show about sex, family history and motherhood. Yon herself somehow acquired a searing mental image (this was how she first imagined the mechanics of making a baby) of her great-grandparents joylessly coupling in a hospital once a year, with Betsy barely present in her body and André grimly following medical advice – he had been told that bearing children would fortify his wife’s health and help resolve her symptoms. Despite her desire to exorcise inherited psychic damage from her body, Snow White seems not to know her own mind. Her husband ideally wants five children, but she’s not so sure. Still, she makes babies as fast as she can, afraid that if she takes a break from childbearing she may not find the courage to start again. There’s also a cousin who makes ceramic sculptures, which she sees as (again) a physical way of processing something internal. She works the clay obsessively while giving Yon her interpretation of family history, but the word she uses for clay is not ‘argile’ but ‘terre’, so that when she says she puts all the darkness that is in her into the clay it’s understood that she means a sort of interment. Only creation can help us survive, even if her chosen form of creativity is also a burial above ground.

Yon resists schizophrenia as a diagnosis for her great-grandmother but accepts it (as well as multiple personality disorder) as an analogy for her own mental state when she reaches the end of her researches, her mind resounding with the family’s conflicting voices. She will put everything down in writing before, as she puts it, the tide of her anger can ebb from her internal beach, receding from the rocks and seaweed until nothing is left on the churned damp sand of her consciousness except a few translucent crabs picked clean by seagulls.

The whole book is a formidable rhetorical performance, however its readers decide to assign its genre, powered by surges of rage in its personal sections, darkly dazzling rather than enlightening in its overall effect. If the testimony of Yon’s grandfather were presented as a whole, rather than being dispersed through the text, it would amount to a coherent portrait of a mentally ill woman who was hideously mistreated. That this interpretation is retrievable with a little effort might be a subtle intention of the author’s, though on these pages subtlety comes second to intensity. A book that acknowledged the authority that her grandfather’s testimony earned over the course of the book would express a less dogmatic anger, recognising that the family fears had more reality than a giant phosphorescent dog prowling the moor.