Live Fast by Brigitte Giraud

Winner of the Prix Goncourt, and translated from the original French by Cory Stockwell.

There is an unusual form of French novel, of which this is a prime example, called the recit. It’s a sort of self-aware narrative, in which the narrator knows that they’re telling a story, with all the inherent discomfort of self-consciousness. This approach is what makes the tale told in Live Fast less autobiography than auto-fiction — a distinction that may seem overly cute to readers in English but which acknowledges the fact that reality is what we make of it, and who truly knows what lies in the heart of others?

The story itself is based on the death of the author’s husband Claude, killed too young in a motorcycle accident while heading home from work one day in 1999. Only 41 years-old, Claude loved music and motorcycles, and had borrowed a particularly powerful example of the latter on the day he died. The death was clearly accidental, but over two decades after the fact, the narrator still grieves and, understandably, finds herself looking for ways in which things could have turned out differently. Where she differs from the usual mourner is in how she delicately teases out the minute and myriad possibilities in which a single change in the tapestry of their lives could have kept him alive: things she could have done, things he could have done, things the entire universe could have made happen so that he would not have met his end so suddenly on that sunny afternoon.

As an obsessive thinker myself, I immediately identified with the thought processes that drove her to this. “What if I hadn’t insisted on buying that house?” she asks herself. “What if Claude hadn’t borrowed my brother’s motorcycle? What if the weather had been rainy instead of fine?” The long list of If Onlys tortures her as she combs through their histories, musing on everything from her grandfather’s suicide to global trade regulations to the seemingly inconsequential little choices that can change your life irrevocably. It is a crushing survey of guilt and responsibility and desire and, above all, futility in the face of death’s finality.

For that reason alone, LF is a hard read for anyone who’s ever known the grief of abruptly losing someone adored. You can’t help but want to blame something, especially yourself, in order to reassert control over and make sense of the world. The fact that Brigitte Giraud’s pain still persists over twenty years on calls to the most tender and still unhealed parts of any grieving reader’s psyche. I wept several times reading this, both in recognition of and in solidarity with her lasting emotions.

Yet the writing is compelling and not without hope. While I thought the ending could have used a little more exploration, I did take comfort in the flipside that Ms Giraud found in her exacting scrutiny of her own tragedy. Fueled by the love of music she shared with Claude, she tells us:

You can make song lyrics say anything you want. Just like you can find meaning in any form of reality.

That, perhaps, is the main reason her story could only have been told as a recit, this acknowledgment that situations and details may differ but the underlying emotions will always reach out and resonate — and, if we’re lucky, provide comfort. Meaning can be found in so much and so little, and the truly important thing is to remember the love and the joy and to carry them forward with you throughout the rest of your life. To quote from another book that I recently read and enjoyed (Dead In The Frame by Stephen Spotswood, that I’ll be reviewing separately at CriminalElement.com):

What will be will be, and all we can do is learn from it. We must contend with the world that is, not the one that was, or the one that could have been.

I’m (obviously) going through a weird ass time, so it’s been heartening to be reminded of all this, that love and joy are worthy in themselves and that while blame can be a temporary salve for pain, embracing the happiness of memory is better. Because life does go on for us survivors. We get to make our own choices going forward, and we get to decide how we process our pain. We don’t need to forget or deny: we only have to learn and accept and remember that the existence of love has always been its own reward.

Live Fast by Brigitte Giraud was published February 11 2025 by Ecco and is available from all good booksellers, including