The Words to Say It

Marie Cardinal’s autobiographical novel, The Words to Say It (1983), follows her experience with psychoanalysis, which she underwent on-and-off for a period of seven years. Beginning with a bout of severe mental illness in her 30s, and moving back in time to her childhood in Algeria, her relationship to her mother, and the traumas and beauties of daily life, Cardinal explores what it means to be loved and to love herself, despite the horrors of her past.

The novel begins in a quiet, dirty, cul-de-sac in a Paris suburb. Thirty-year-old Marie Cardinal finds herself here, looking to be born again. She has heard of a famous psychoanalyst who lives in this neighborhood and is desperately seeking his help—she has been struggling with mental illness and severe menstrual problems that, for years, no doctor has been able to diagnose. Having recently escaped from a sanatorium, she knows that this doctor is her last hope to find sanity and health. Marie has contemplated suicide, due in large part to her ailments, but she has three children—for the sake of her family, she journeys to the suburbs, to the doctor, to find a new life.

Marie is suffering from something she calls “The Thing,” a horrific, looming specter of chaos and agitation that she believes is causing the constant bleeding from her vagina that doctors' claim is merely a menstrual malady. Despite Marie's insistence that the madness inside her is causing the bleeding, doctors assured her otherwise—there was always no connection, or else the madness was only a symptom of hormonal imbalance.



After a prolonged period of madness and ill health in which Marie found herself in a sanitorium, she knew she needed a particular kind of rebirth. And so, she finds herself in the office of a Parisian psychoanalyst, a small, distant man who says nothing while Marie speaks of her ailments, her traumas, her life. Uninterested in her physical maladies, the psychoanalyst, instead, tells her to focus on stories, words—what meaning she is making for herself. After the first session, miraculously, Marie stops bleeding. After that first hour, she goes back three times a week, in search of a cure for “The Thing.”

Marie describes much of what she tells the psychoanalyst. She returns to her childhood in Algeria, where she was the only daughter of a wealthy, plantation-owning divorcée and devoted Catholic. Her mother becomes the focus of much of her time with the psychoanalyst, as she details the ways her mother, so loving of others, completely ignored and distanced her only living child.

Marie's mother had already lost one child by the time Marie was born—she was convinced that the baby was killed by her late husband. Finally, her memories of her mother bring her to one horrific revelation—a memory, at fourteen, of her mother revealing that she had tried to abort Marie, but the procedure had failed. From there, Marie dives into dreams, hallucinations, and other altered states of consciousness, ultimately emerging from the psychoanalyst’s couch a new woman. Marie is able to move on with her life in a way that she never could, free from the most painful epitome of her self-hatred, and her reliance on caste and self-image. By the end of the novel, Marie is not entirely whole, as none of us are, but she no longer has the urge to die.



Marie Cardinal, born Simone Odette Marie-Thérèse Cardinal, was a French novelist born in Algeria in 1929. From a wealthy family, she studied in Paris before receiving a doctorate in philosophy and teaching in Lisbon, Vienna, and Montreal. Cardinal published her first novel in the early 1960s but did not gain a reputation as a novelist until the publication of two novels, The Key of the Door in 1972 and The Words to Say It in 1975. Cardinal was also briefly involved in films, playing roles in films by Jean-Luc Goddard and Robert Bresson. Her books have been translated into many languages. She died in France in 2001.