Fiction as a Way to Seek the Truth

Fiction as a Way to Seek the Truth is The Narrator’s response to a central impasse in her investigation of the Jade/Alice case: the available facts can establish parts of a life and a sequence of events, but they cannot fully disclose what Alice Espanet experienced or what she felt at a decisive moment. The Narrator does not treat fiction as a license to settle those uncertainties. Instead, she considers it a way to approach what remains unknowable while making the writer’s choices, limits, and responsibilities part of the inquiry.

Research Before Invention

The method begins not with a fictional scene but with practical research. During Erik’s two-week adjustment period at daycare, The Narrator works in a café across the street. As the child gradually spends longer stretches away from her, she brings her laptop and lays the groundwork for the investigation: making lists, identifying primary sources, and deciding which places she needs to visit. The work proceeds alongside the ordinary demands of caring for a young child; when the mothers at the next table leave, she closes her computer, washes her hands, and hurries back to collect him.

Even at this early stage, gathering material is inseparable from deciding what kind of book can be written. The Narrator asks whether she should take the position of a defense lawyer or resemble a prosecutor, and whether the writer’s task is to judge or to leave judgment to readers. She weighs a journalistic account, restricted to known facts and leaving what cannot be known in darkness, against the use of fiction. The violence against children makes the question of giving the story literary shape feel perilous, so she postpones it rather than pretending to have solved it.

The Ethics of Representation

The uncertainty extends to the particulars of representation. The Narrator considers whether dates, names, and other concrete information should be changed for moral, legal, or literary reasons. She also wonders whether to contact Alice Espanet, perhaps by letter or through a face-to-face meeting. Her own impulse is ambivalent, and she recognizes that a meeting might not clarify the book’s subject at all: it could instead redirect attention away from what matters. The possibility of access therefore does not automatically become a claim to use it. The investigation asks not only what can be found, but what the writer is entitled to seek and what a new encounter might do to the story.

These are not abstract questions detached from the labor of research. The Narrator types them compulsively while Erik adapts—or, as she puts it in effect, resigns himself—to daycare. The scene places the high-stakes problem of representing another person beside interruptions from local publications and radio stations, lingering attention from other parents, and the routine of collecting her child. The book’s search for truth takes shape amid competing obligations, not in a position outside ordinary life.

The Clinic and the Limits of a Template

At a fertility clinic, The Narrator recognizes that her first approach has already imposed a simplifying story on Alice Espanet. She has been writing as if Alice were an ordinary patient with infertility and a conventional desire to hold a child of her own. But the clinic cannot confirm that this frame fits. After being politely turned out of the waiting room, The Narrator continues her inquiry from the café, watching prospective parents and trying to speak with doctors despite the possibility of humiliation. A receptionist takes pity on her and recalls Alice’s long treatment with Ritxi, although Alice is a taboo subject there and no one speaks about her directly.

The receptionist remembers Alice as extreme, moving from a high point to a low one and never occupying the middle; she cannot say whether the clinic should have regarded her as an ordinary patient. The treatment history gives the inquiry concrete ground without resolving that question. After three cycles of insemination—with injections, scans, and follicle counts repeated each time—the pregnancy had not occurred. The couple were advised to proceed to in vitro fertilization, a longer, more expensive, painful, and distressing process. They agreed, having already passed what The Narrator describes as the point of no return. These details disclose the scale of the couple’s treatment, but they do not explain Alice’s inner life or make her fit an uncomplicated account of motherhood and infertility.

From a Clear Portrait to Fiction

A parallel limit emerges in The Narrator’s conversation with Léa in Avignon. The more Léa says about Alice, the more the mystery seems to recede, until the life being assembled threatens to become a familiar explanatory template: an erratic adolescence, a disordered family environment, and one or more undiagnosed mental illnesses. The portrait may be clear, The Narrator reflects, without explaining the events. Information can sharpen description while leaving the essential question untouched.

That failure changes the direction of the project. The Narrator decides that it may be necessary to move away from reality as a record and closer to fiction, trusting that some truth might escape through its cracks. The formulation does not promise a hidden answer or claim that invented scenes can repair missing evidence. It marks a change in method: when factual reconstruction produces a defined but insufficient portrait, imaginative writing may explore the gap without passing speculation off as certainty.

Writing What Cannot Be Said

The approach also has an emotional cost. During the night with Léa, The Narrator cries in the darkness and feels disgusted by everything. She recognizes that some things are difficult to speak about and that this difficulty is precisely why she has to write about them, even if doing so feels wrong. Back at the hotel, she records what the evening has yielded in her notebook before returning to the bathroom to express milk; only a few drops come, as her body adjusts quickly. The investigative act remains bound to the material routines of her own life as a mother.

Fiction, in this account, is neither a verdict on Alice Espanet nor an escape from factual responsibility. It is a way to acknowledge that research has boundaries: the sources can suggest circumstances, treatment, and patterns, but they cannot provide complete access to another person’s consciousness. The Narrator’s turn toward invention follows from that boundary and remains haunted by it. Writing becomes a form of attention to what cannot be said directly, not proof that uncertainty has disappeared.