It is a strange thing to grieve a monster, but it is stranger still when the person you feared is also the one who was supposed to protect you. Anne Pauly’s debut novel, Before I Forget, translated by Dina Leifer, begins with the death of Jean-Pierre. His children, Anne and Jean-François, are left to sort through his belongings and arrange his funeral, while struggling to mourn a man who was a violent, erratic alcoholic. Pauly does not shy away from the visceral truths of domestic abuse; she relays a childhood spent watching this giant of a man chase their mother around the kitchen table with a knife, or smash furniture during his fits of explosive, drunken rage. By writing it as autofiction and giving the narrator her own name, Pauly is able to explore the blurred lines of grief; because how are you supposed to process the death of someone you neither completely loved nor completely hated?

But what do you say about yourself to a stranger when you’re about to die? What’s the final account? Do you confess how badly you and your existential angst ruined the lives of your contemporaries? p.75

The main difficulty with this 140-page story, at least initially, is its structural formlessness, which makes the first half quite tough to get through. The timelines shift constantly, moving from a memory Anne has of her father to a scene where she and her brother are choosing a coffin, and then back again. Whilst this formlessness feels like a well-written and creative representation of grief, it does slightly hurt the reading experience by robbing the narrative of forward momentum. Flipping between the funeral preparations and flashbacks of her father over and over again felt quite stagnant. It was difficult to find my footing in the story.

Moreover, Anne’s father, Jean-Pierre, only ever appears in Anne’s memories, so he never quite solidified into a real person for me. Because he is filtered entirely through these flashbacks rather than interacting in the present timeline, he felt more like a concept of a person rather than a true flesh-and-blood character. I could tell the book was inviting me to build some form of complex, conflicted opinion of him, to grapple with the monster who had inflicted so much pain and the vulnerable old man at the same time. But I simply found I had nothing to give him. Honestly, my heart was completely with Anne. As we are quite literally in Anne’s head as she goes through each horrible stage of grief, it’s difficult not to feel protective of her. In the end, my desire for her to be loved and understood completely by those around her eclipsed any obligation I felt to parse out her father’s legacy.

I thought I would die of love and grief. For one last time, I admired him for his original, much-misunderstood mind, the elegant precision of his ideas, the senseless stubbornness which restricted him to do this when he had such breadth, and for teaching me to recognize the poetry that comes from humble things. p.108

Striking a balance between grief and humour is incredibly difficult to pull off, but Before I Forget does it very well. To be honest, Anne’s sense of humour was the main reason I felt a connection to her, in a way I never could with her father, whose looming memory always felt so heavy regardless of any light-hearted content there. There’s a moment where she stares blankly at the Bible, trying to select a funeral reading, recalling how, as a child, she assumed the Corinthians were a devious bunch of people who constantly needed letters telling them to behave. It is a genuinely funny moment that spotlights her character, showing how she handles her stress and grief through comedy. The shield of humour she uses in this moment, for me, felt less like a wall to keep people out and more like a doorway where I could really understand her inner thoughts and therefore resonate with her on a much deeper level.

What I did find extremely compelling was how Pauly depicted the differences between the siblings as they grieved. Anne spent her adult life trying to escape her childhood, yet her underlying love for her father brings her back to look after him when he becomes ill. Because she is looking for some form of closure, she spends the short novel consumed by regret after he passes, feeling selfish for not being there enough during his last summers and wishing she had tended to him more. On the other side of the coin, her brother, Jean-François, views the past in a more black and white manner. To seemingly protect himself from feeling any further pain, he remembers his father only as the nightmare of his childhood—the alcoholic bully who would launch into drunken rages, scream insults, and lock his own family out of the house. Therefore he has little patience for the effort Anne put in. They certainly did not see eye to eye, and their tense interactions seem to isolate Anne even more with her grief. Still, I deeply appreciated the acknowledgement of how two children can mourn the same person so differently; it captures how messy family trauma can really be.

To be honest, I’d already done this: taken liberties with the Church and Comrade Jesus. And at the end of the day, a little bit of warmth wouldn’t hurt. We were alive, weren’t we? p.78

The story really found its heart halfway through during the funeral service, which was easily my favourite part of the book. Here, Pauly leans into the absurdity of grief, highlighting the stark differences between her perceived cold religious rituals and the warmth of human community. She describes the traditional Catholic Mass as being so painfully long, and the priest literally falls asleep after he finishes his sermon! That moment, I won’t lie, got a chuckle out of me. Yet, the best part was when Anne turned around and saw how the church was completely full. Witnessing how her heart swelled as she realised that, despite his flaws and the difficult history they shared, people actually liked her dad enough to show up for him, was unusually sweet. As we have read of her guilt over not being there enough for her father, seeing all those people in the pews, more than anything, made me feel such relief for her. 

The second half of the book picks up the pacing significantly when it stops focusing on the funeral logistics. We are directly with Anne, in her thoughts, as she tries to confront her grief now that the funeral is behind her. This is where Pauly’s prose really shines as she shows us the ugly side of loss. Anne becomes so incredibly sad, angry, and impatient with the world, taking her frustrations out on the people around her. Whether she is arguing with her girlfriend or snapping at friends, it is a very honest depiction of grief. Dina Leifer’s translation does an incredible job here too, capturing Pauly’s deep and lyrical prose without losing any of the emotion, no matter how hideous or harsh the language needs to be.

His real personality re-emerged, finally shedding its stinking, alcoholic-soaked rags: he was a contemplative type, refined but clumsy, kind but rough, generous but self-centred, eaten up by anxiety and shyness, unbelievably awkward. A tourist in his own life. Against all expectations, the monster was human, vulnerable and endearing. p.78

For a short novel, Before I Forget gives you a great deal to sit with. Anne has things she wants to remember about her father, things she is angry about, and things she could never have said at his funeral. In writing this book, she has somewhere to put all of that. I did indeed struggle with the first half, but the strength of the second half made me so glad she had written it. Once the funeral was over and everyone had gone home, I’m pleased that she had these pages where she could just keep talking about him for a little longer.