Die, My Love

The novel is narrated by an unnamed woman, an educated foreigner living in the rural French countryside with her husband and infant son. Her interior monologue, volatile and fractured, moves between present-tense domestic scenes, flashbacks, and fantasies as she contends with motherhood, desire, and an escalating psychological crisis.

The narrator lies in the grass near her converted dairy farmhouse, fantasizing about cutting her own throat while her husband and baby splash in a paddling pool nearby. She spies on them from the underbrush, questioning how a woman like her can be a mother, then drops the knife and hangs out laundry as though nothing has happened. Under the pergola, she calls her husband "my love," a term they use mechanically even when they despise each other. Privately, she wishes she were dead.

Domestic claustrophobia defines her days. She breastfeeds in a blue-lit room, hallucinates the baby's crying, and describes a recurring compulsion to crash through the glass patio door, though she always stops herself. A social worker once visited after the narrator's alarmed mother-in-law called, advising her to step away from the baby when the crying becomes unbearable. The couple sleeps in separate beds.

When her husband travels for work, the narrator's paranoia and hostility intensify. She checks the baby's breathing obsessively and imagines her husband sleeping with a drive-thru worker at a roadside hotel. She reveals a pattern of aggression toward strangers: intimidating a home-care nurse, yelling at cashiers, placing a plastic doll on her car's back seat in summer to provoke panicked onlookers. When her husband returns, they kiss without tongue. Later that night, they nearly collide in the hallway, both flushed from having masturbated separately.

A flashback to Christmas during the narrator's pregnancy shows her surrounded by her husband's extended family. Her mother-in-law offers her a pill, likely Prozac, which the narrator tosses into the fire. Her father-in-law keeps a rifle on his nightstand. Exhausted by contractions and the family's relentless questions, the narrator escapes into the woods, where her husband finds her jumping through puddles.

After the baby is born, her decline deepens. She sits on the porch at nightfall, afraid of the harm she could cause the newborn, perceiving death in every object around her. Her father-in-law dies in his sleep. At his funeral, the baby smiles at the headstones while mourners cry. The narrator feels close to her mother-in-law for the first time; the older woman's grief is consuming, and she continues washing her dead husband's trousers, cooking for two, and sleepwalking through the village.

The novel shifts briefly to a radiologist at a city health clinic who is consumed by obsessive desire for the narrator. He watches her from his motorcycle as he passes her front gate each day. Married with a daughter who has severe disabilities, he confesses to crying on his kitchen floor at dawn, acknowledging that a single image of the narrator has poisoned him. One night he rides to her house. The narrator tells him to grab a knife and slice his lip open. He obeys.

Domestic tension escalates. A new dog urinates at the dinner table and breaks the narrator's glass. Her husband forces her into the car for a late-night drive. In the fog, a stag hits the windscreen, injuring the dog. They name the animal Bloody. That night, driven mad by Bloody's agonized cries, the narrator retrieves her dead father-in-law's shotgun from her mother-in-law's house. She aims the gun at her sleeping husband and demands he kill the suffering animal. He refuses. She goes to the kitchen corner where Bloody lies on a filthy rag and pulls the trigger.

The affair with the radiologist begins with a kiss at the narrator's front gate while her husband sleeps and the baby falls out of bed. The husband discovers melted condoms in the car's glove compartment and confronts her. The argument escalates to kicks and blows until the narrator runs outside and, for the first time, crashes straight through the glass patio door she has long fantasized about breaking. Covered in blood, she crosses the pastures and lies among graves until sunrise. She is hospitalized, and nurses remove shards of glass from cuts all over her body.

Her deterioration accelerates. She destroys the bedroom, throwing a chair at the mirror. In the autumn woods, a stag appears at nightfall; the narrator describes meeting its gaze as the closest she has come to levitating. She ties the baby to her body and hops through the fields, loses sight of him, and finds him high in a tree. She dunks him in icy water to baptize him, and the child turns dangerously pale. A search party of neighbors comes to pull them from the wilderness.

She spies on the radiologist at his home, hiding in his bushes until he discovers her. He leads her to his attic, locks the door, and they consummate the affair while his wife and daughter are downstairs.

One morning, the husband uses the word "treatment," envisioning a place with white walls and pills. The narrator vomits over the table. When she returns from the fields, her husband and son are watching a game show. She proposes marriage. Without looking up from the television, he agrees. They marry in a makeshift ceremony with champagne and a parish priest. Before she can answer the vows, she envisions herself running toward a parallel life. On the wedding night, the narrator waits for her groom in her white dress. He never arrives.

The narrator is driven to a residential treatment facility, comparing herself to Zelda Fitzgerald. Her husband and son wave goodbye and drive away singing. In couples therapy, the husband says he lives in a permanent state of alert; the therapist, alarmed by the narrator's behavior, requests she stay another week. A family trip to the beach ends in a public scene when the narrator, jealous of her sleeping husband's erotic dream, exposes him. A bystander scolds her, and her husband carries the boy away without defending her.

Waking one morning in the facility, the narrator notices with alarm that she no longer feels any love for her son. She is discharged in a farewell celebration and driven home through the countryside, the child raising his hands to let the air rush between his fingers through the open roof.

At home, the reflection of the first knife she ever dreamed of returns to her hand. She runs outside to search for the stag. She organizes a second birthday party for her son. Everything appears successful until her gaze falls on a mound of earth in the garden, Bloody's grave, and she remembers shooting the dog. She rushes inside, slams the bedroom door, and tells everyone she hopes they die. She gets into the convertible without a license, shouts that their son is her gift to her husband, and drives to the radiologist's house. She finds only his daughter in the window and falls asleep in an armchair.

The radiologist and his wife return from mushroom-gathering, and the narrator's husband arrives on a motorcycle. The two men walk off into the open fields and appear to reach an understanding. The narrator recognizes her husband's cough when he returns and knows he is the more loyal of the two. Driving home, the husband tells her the radiologist and his wife are expecting twins. Despite everything, both laugh, and they fall into hysterics.

The narrator climbs out of the convertible without opening the door and disappears into the undergrowth. She describes being in mourning for a long time, but eventually, like a widow unlocking her front door for the first time, she feels a sadness that is exhilarating and wild.