Surviving Charlie Hebdo

Winner Prix Femina and Prix du Roman News

Paris, January 7, 2015. Two terrorists who claim allegiance to ISIS attack the satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo. The event causes untold pain to the victims and their families, prompts a global solidarity movement, and ignites a fierce debate over press freedoms and the role of satire today. Philippe Lançon, a journalist, author, and a weekly contributor to Charlie Hebdo is gravely wounded in the attack. This intense life experience upends his relationship to the world, to writing, to reading, to love and to friendship. As he attempts to reconstruct his life on the page, Lançon rereads Proust, Thomas Mann, Kafka, and others in search of guidance. It is a year before he can return to writing, a year in which he learns to work through his experiences and their aftermath.

Disturbance is not an essay on terrorism nor is it a witness’s account of Charlie Hebdo. The attack and what followed are part of Lançon’s narrative, which, instead, touches upon the universal. It is an honest, intimate account of a man seeking to put his life back together after it has been torn apart.

Disturbance is a book about survival, resilience, and reconstruction, about transformation, about one man’s shifting relationship to time, to writing and journalism, to truth, and to his own body.

Philippe Lançon
Philippe Lançon is a French journalist and writer born in 1963. His memoir, Disturbance, won the 2018 Prix Femina, Prix du Roman News, and Prix Renaudot Jury’s Special Prize, and was also named Best Book of the Year by the magazines Lire and Les Inrockuptibles. He is the author of the novels L’Élan (2013) and Les îles (2011).

• Feb 24 2020
  “A powerful and deeply civilized memoir.”
  — The New York Times
• Jan 31 2020
  He endured 20 surgeries after the Charlie Hebdo shooting — and is still trying to reckon with his survival
  — The Washington Post
• Jan 16 2020
  “...a major work sure to leave a lasting impression on anyone who reads it.”
  — France-Amérique
• Jan 14 2020
  “There isn’t a single misstep in the book.”
  — On the Seawall
• Jan 11 2020
  Offline: Truth at life's extremes
  — The Lancet
• Dec 26 2019
  Je Suis Charlie
  — Los Angeles Review of Books