PARIS — Camille Kouchner, a slight, cleareyed woman who for decades was consumed by guilt, has become the big disrupter of French society. Her battle to liberate herself from a painful family secret has touched a nerve across France.
For decades, Ms. Kouchner felt trapped. “Guilt is like a snake,” she writes in “La Familia Grande,” a book whose tale of incest and abuse is also the unsparing portrait of a prominent French family. It was a “poison,” a many-headed “hydra,” invading “all the space in my mind and my heart.” Until she felt she had no choice but to set down the unspeakable.