Review: My Sweet Guillotine — An enjoyable, easy read, but don’t expect much more than that

Jayne Tuttle’s My Sweet Guillotine was an enjoyable, easy read about love and French culture. But don’t expect much more than that.

Image Credit: Hardie Grant

While reading Jayne Tuttle’s new book, My Sweet Guillotine (2022), I wondered if Tuttle too – was once a struggling actress, living and working in Paris. An Australian woman who moved away from home to cope with her mother’s death, and to pursue her artistic endeavours. A complicated, headstrong woman who loved Paris wholeheartedly for its many romantic promises, in spite of the city’s countless frustrations and institutional shortcomings. Did she, too, experience a near-fatal accident in an old Parisian building?

As it turns out, My Sweet Guillotine is a memoir: the “sequel” to her first memoir, Paris or Die (2019) — a fact I should have known before researching for this review. But rather than being riddled with embarrassment, I realised these thoughts were a powerful testament to the authenticity of her writing. Tuttle primarily writes about love, suffering and grief – human experiences universal to everyone – but her unflinching honesty would have been difficult to replicate if one had not experienced these events themselves.

After Tuttle was nearly decapitated by a 1930’s Parisian elevator in the 20th arrondissement, she recovers in her Victorian hometown before returning to Paris. Trauma is a central recurring theme throughout the text, as Tuttle grapples with the dire physical and emotional consequences of the accident for much of her life. She grows increasingly aware of not just danger, but of her own mortality.

As time passes, she even questions the facts of her own incident, denying any help from others. “I’m fine”, she says, “I don’t want to think about it, I just want to forget and move on from my life.” Tuttle’s writing is gripping and real, no doubt — denial is often a defence mechanism for trauma survivors, and a relatable behaviour more generally. However, I found her recount of the accident to be underwhelming, unsatisfying for what it deserved. To describe the incident, she deviates from the prosaic form of the text by using what is reminiscent of Rupi Kaur and Instagram poetry. Some of Jayne’s immediate reactions to the event, for example, lack emotional potency by coming across as off-handed remarks:

         “Oh God, I think I just died.

         It’s ok, it was a good life…

         I’ll just lie here now.

         God it feels good to lie here. God it feels good to be dead.”

This is not to say most of the book is underwhelming — much of it sharply details the mundanities of Tuttle’s everyday life. She writes about conversations with friends, difficulties with her career, dealing with cultural differences, romantic walks à la Seine, falling in and out of love, whether it be with people or Paris. I found her insights into French culture to be fascinating. She observes the nuances of Parisian life with an acute eye reserved for outsiders, noticing the small details that most French people would likely dismiss or regard as “normal”: the profound intimacy of the endearment ma Chérie, for example, or the frustrating bureaucracies of French banks. When Tuttle makes the difficult decision of taking legal action, her meditations on the French concept of juste were illuminating, particularly when they were juxtaposed to American or Australian approaches to tort law, which most Australian readers would be more familiar with.

“They don’t cover suffering here”, her lawyer says. “This is Paris. It’s a very particular city… It’s an old city and it has its own rules… You must know your case isn’t going to make a lick of difference to the way things operate.”

My Sweet Guillotine was an enjoyable, easy read. But don’t expect much more than that. It wasn’t a very memorable book for me, which is unfortunate considering it touches on numerous important topics of societal concern. Tuttle, however, is undoubtedly an astute observer of culture. Her writing on love and French culture, in particular, is encapsulating, and a delight to read. 

My Sweet Guillotine hits shelves 7 September.