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Adèle Yon’s debut 'prises apart entrenched narratives around mental distress with an icy rage'
Fitzcarraldo Editions has acquired chef and researcher Adèle Yon’s debut My Real Name Is Elisabeth about the author’s great-grandmother who was forcibly institutionalised and eventually lobotomised.
Editor Charlotte Jackson acquired world English Language rights from Delphine Ribouchon at Éditions du Sous-Sol. Milo Walls, editor at FSG, pre-empted North American rights from Fitzcarraldo Editions, with simultaneous publication scheduled for autumn 2027 in a translation by Alice Yang.
Fitzcarraldo Editions described the debut as “uncategorisable” and described it as “a literary phenomenon in France… the book has sold over 200,000 copies since publication in February 2025”.
The publisher added: “In post-war France, Adèle Yon’s great-grandmother, Elisabeth, was diagnosed with schizophrenia and forcibly institutionalised for 17 years at the behest of her husband, André. After years of subjection to electroshock treatment, she was eventually lobotomised.
“Within the family she becomes a ‘non-subject’, a figure of affection and occasional hilarity who comes to haunt her female descendants, eventually dying alone in a care home. My Real Name Is Elisabeth is Yon’s relentless investigation into the life of a woman who was entirely and violently dispossessed, driven by the desire to break her family’s silence and to lay out the aftershocks of this violence through the ensuing generations.”
Fitzcarraldo Editions said of the author’s inventive approach to the book: “With formal daring, Yon adopts a hybrid structure that echoes how Elisabeth’s mind might have functioned in the wake of lobotomy, and that meets the complex task of recovering a life.
“She draws on the detective story and the road trip, the novel and the essay; the work shifts between narrative, recovered letters, interviews with family members, medical records and archival material in a search takes us from the figure of the madwoman in literature and cinema to the history of psychiatry and the social construction of ‘madness’ – ultimately, to the roots of terror itself. In the interstices an image of the real Elisabeth emerges, inevitably incomplete. But against the impossibility of Elisabeth’s life being re-lived, Yon’s determination to witness without flinching may be the only available form of restitution.”
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Born in Paris in 1994, Yon is a researcher, writer and chef. A graduate of the École Normale Supérieure specialising in film studies, she began writing as she worked on her thesis at the SACRe research-creation institute. She also works in Paris and in the western area of France, Sarthe, as a head chef.
Yon said: “Every family has its own Elisabeth. This initial intuition – the impulse that pushed me to transform the investigation into my great-grandmother’s life into a novel – has become a certainty as I discuss my book in bookshops, festivals and universities. Each gathering becomes an open (feminine) space where we examine our family silences and the violence they continue to carry into the present.”
Jackson said: “My Real Name Is Elisabeth is a singularly affecting work that prises apart entrenched narratives around mental distress with an icy rage. The book’s rare empathy of form coheres entirely with its clarity of intent, and despite its very personal dimension, Adèle Yon’s fundamental concern with justice and truth touches on all human life: her writing bears out this force to the very last page. It’s a thrill to bring this formidable, unclassifiable work to anglophone readers, and to work on it with Adèle, Milo and Alice.”
Walls commented: “From the bright shock of its first page, My Real Name Is Elisabeth is a book of true originality. Written with the atmosphere and velocity of a detective story, the forensic clarity of first-rate investigative nonfiction and the sweep and feeling of a classic family novel, it is a tale of violence – intimate, world historical – propelled by the urge to know, and by Adèle Yon’s bold refusal to look away.”
