Life & Fable – Guislaine Vincent
ISBN: 9781788648660
£13.99
PRE-ORDER NOW (Available January)
A line of pain runs through generations of families… until one generation stops to question the ancestral forces behind the door.
In Life & Fable Guislaine Vincent explores archetypal patterns in the ancestral background of her family’s storytelling, peeling away the layers to discover a self in myth and fable. As the narrative unfolds, it’s the implacable presence of childhood that recurs, not only in events, but in how events reveal the self.
Mektoub, my father would say: it is written.
From a great grandfather found in the deserts of Syria and named after the monastery that takes him in to the pain of losing a child; from a childhood of 14 schools across multiple countries to training as a Jungian Psychoanalyst, this is a life story that asks deep questions about who we are and how we peel back reality to find the truth in fables.
Praise for Life & Fable
In this gorgeous memoir, Guislaine Vincent gives us a life that is evocative of love lost and found again and again, as she shows that one of the secrets to living a life is, in Flaubert’s words, ‘L’acte d’observation est une tendresse.’
Peter Watson, author and veteran journalist
‘…a carefully rendered and deeply evocative piece of writing… geographic diversity is one of the most intoxicating elements of the storytelling.’
Faber Academy Reader
Author biography
Born in New York, Guislaine Vincent is raised in a post WWII rush through North America, South America, Spain, England, France, Switzerland—attending fourteen schools. The mix of culture and languages mirrored in literature keeps her company, saying what no one is saying about the madness of her family’s way of life.
Over thirty-one years she is twice married to, and divorced from, the same man. Along the way there are enormous losses that return Guislaine to Damascus. There she reconnects with her broken child self through her paternal great-grandfather, an enfant trouvé—a foundling in the deserts of Syria, without memory of family, age, name. The family name bestowed by the monastery in Alexandria that took him in —St Vincent de Paul.
Searching for a place that holds in her mid-fifties, she trains as a Jungian Psychoanalyst. Against the odds, she draws on her unusual upbringing, life experience, art, and the influence of a maternal grandfather she never knew, but remains present. Elton Mayo, an Industrial Psychologist. And in a three-day workshop on Jung’s Word Association Experiment, Guislaine writes a fairy tale about a child without a name that, years later re-writes itself into fable.
It’s with recognition and the love-call of a name that the story will end.
Guislaine writes, sculpts and draws. She has published articles, short stories and fiction in national newspapers and magazines (Literary Review, The Observer Magazine, The Saturday Times Review, Harpers&Queen) and has published two books The Food of Love, A StoryCookbook (Chatto & Windus, chosen by Carmen Callil) and No Name, To Be A Witch Is Not A Willed Thing.
author photograph © Kate Kuzminova Photography
cover image from original painting © Consuelo Child-Villiers