Nathalie Léger

Translated by Natasha Lehrer

First English edition published on 31 March 2020

French booksellers’ award Prix Wepler 2018

‘She wanted to bring peace to countries that had known war. She said she thought she could do that simply by wearing a wedding dress. I wasn’t interested in the grace or foolishness of her intentions; what interested me was that she hoped this gesture would be enough to mend something that was so out of proportion with it – and that she did not make it. Can a white dress ever be enough to make amends for the world’s torments? Probably no more than words can ever be enough to do justice to a weeping mother.’ — Nathalie Léger

On 8 March 2008, the Italian performance artist Pippa Bacca undertook an unusual and symbolic journey: her aim was to promote the cause of peace by hitchhiking from Milan to Jerusalem, wearing a customized white wedding dress, and documenting the experience by video.

In telling the young woman’s story, which overwhelms her and inexorably draws her in, Nathalie Léger recounts the different stages of her research and strikes upon something fundamental within Bacca’s performance: the desire to remedy the unfathomable nature of violence and war. Through this intense examination of Bacca’s final work and of the often polarised public reaction to the role of women in art, Léger also compellingly addresses her own conflicted relationship with her elderly mother.

Read an excerpt on Granta
Watch a series of videos from the Institut Français du Royaume-Uni on The White Dress, featuring an introduction by Jonathan Gibbs, a reading by Natasha Lehrer and an interview with Nathalie Léger
See reviews in the White Review, the New York Review of Books and more

‘I’ve just re-read Suite for Barbara Loden by Nathalie Léger, translated by Cécile Menon and Natasha Lehrer, as well as the two forthcoming books that form a trilogy with that one: The White Dress, also translated by Lehrer, and Exposition, translated by Amanda Demarco. All three defy categorisation – history, essay, memoir, fiction. I admire the wholeness and agility of these works very much.’ — Catherine Lacey

‘The White Dress starts with a flimsy-sounding project and accumulates with vigour and anger, each sentence weaving the political into the personal in Léger’s distinctive style to end by packing one hell of a punch. A terrible indictment on the casual, commonplace nature of evil.’ — Selma Dabbagh

By the same author: Suite for Barbara Loden (2015) and Exposition(2019)

136 pages
paperback, 180 x 120 mm
isbn 978-19993318-8-7

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