In the apartment on the sixth floor of Stairwell F, Ed, Lucette, Dany, Bernard, Christian and Patrick suffered the assaults of their violent parents. We were always a united front, astride the imaginary winged horse my sister and I had drawn together – she the top, me the bottom. (…).We were a clump of trees with our bark stripped off, that often trembled, but never bent.

Time passed, the father stopped harming them, the apartment emptied out, but the siblings love is still there. Dany has turned into the best-selling novelist Jeanne Cordelier; she married a brilliant foreigner with whom she had a son (See Reconstruction). The other siblings have gone astray, attempting in vain to make ends meet. Unemployment, divorce, alcoholism, disease: they have suffered them all. Nothing has been spared them. With her characteristic energy and sensibility, the resilient sibling portrays these fragile beings in all their dignity.

The author of La Dérobade (The Life in English) goes home again. The solidarity forged between herself and her siblings during her childhood in the sour atmosphere of the apartment in Stairwell F extends into their adulthood. As death begins to strike her siblings down, Jeanne Cordelier describes these broken lives, giving them back their dignity with her lively style and makes a touching and heartfelt account.