A first novel on the female body, its constraints, and its need for liberation.
Pia’s parents are gods. Or so she believes.
While her mother reigns over beauty, words, and family truths, Pia grows up confined in an orthopedic brace meant to straighten her spine. Surgeries and examinations punctuate her existence. Her body is watched, handled, and commented on by doctors, adults, and her own mother. Little by little, she becomes convinced that she belongs to the camp of monsters rather than that of the chosen.
When the family leaves France to settle in Austria, a new exile begins. Pia must learn a foreign language, endure the gaze of others, and find her place in a world whose codes she does not possess. Amid family mythology, fairy tales, hospitals, and humiliations, she doggedly strives to become worthy of being loved.
Driven by a singular voice, Drôle d’agonie tells the story of the construction of an identity and the hard-won conquest of a body long experienced as foreign. Alma Terrasse has crafted a work that is at once cruel, funny, and moving, exploring shame, difference, and the invention of oneself.
