My Real Name is Elisabeth (Éditions du sous-sol, February 2025), is Adèle Yon’s hard-hitting and personal debut novel. Yon takes an engrossing dive into the history of psychiatry via her personal family secrets. 

The story revolves around Elisabeth, known as "Betsy", Adèle Yon's great-grandmother who, for seventeen years, was committed to a psychiatric hospital after undergoing a non-voluntary lobotomy. The ghost of this relative, "whose name was never uttered", haunts all the women in Yon’s family. Continually reminded of the "bad gene", Adèle Yon lives in constant fear of going "crazy".

But was Betsy really schizophrenic? Transgenerational anxiety pushed the young researcher to investigate. She interviews relatives and searches family archives where she discovers correspondence between Elisabeth and her husband André which reveals the portrait of a "brilliant" woman "too" independent for her time. "Could Andrew have had Betsy interned and lobotomised to get rid of a useless wife who had become a nuisance?"

My Real Name Is Elisabeth is, according to France Inter, a "revolutionary" reading experience. It is a multivoiced novel that is a deep personal story, a social commentary and road trip. The novel is a true literary phenomenon, with 30,000 copies sold and seven print runs in under a month. It has already won the Prix du Nouvel Obs 2025 and is shortlisted for three literary awards: the Prix Léo Scheer, the Prix Régine Deforges du Premier Roman, and the Prix Goncourt du Premier Roman. Translation rights have already been sold in Spanish, Italian, English, and Brazilian Portuguese.

This debut novel’s success is due as much to its unique story as to its broad resonance evidenced by the readers’ personal reactions which are a testimony to the emancipatory force of this book "which begins and ends in anger and tears".

Katrin Boethling and Katja Petrovic
April 2025