D'après une histoire vraie suivi d'un entretien entre Delphine de Vigan et Marianne Épin

Marianne Épin’s performance is the reason this audiobook lingers like a half-remembered dream. Her voice—soft, precise, with a French accent that curls around words like smoke—makes Delphine de Vigan’s meta-narrative feel intimate, almost invasive. She doesn’t over-dramatize the protagonist’s spiral; instead, she lets the prose’s quiet dread seep in, her pauses doing more work than most narrators manage in a paragraph. The duality of the story—part psychological thriller, part existential mirror game—works *because* Épin treats both threads with equal weight. That said, the audiobook’s reliance on ambiguity occasionally risks feeling like a stylistic tic rather than a thematic choice. There were moments where I craved a firmer hand in distinguishing between the protagonist’s reality and her paranoia, a nudge to snap me out of the daze. Still, by the final hours, even the flaws felt deliberate, like the audiobook itself was testing how much unreality an audience can swallow. The bonus interview between de Vigan and Épin is a masterclass in meta-commentary, unpacking the book’s DNA with surprising candor—though it arrives just as the story’s hypnotic pull starts to fade. A polarizing listen, but one that demands to be heard.