‘Kids Run the Show’ by Delphine de Vigan     (2024) – 297 pages        Translated from the French by Alison Anderson

I am both the very wrong person and the very right person to review ‘Kids Run the Show’. On the one hand, I have never watched a reality TV show except for a few early episodes of American Idol. On the other hand, I share the same disdain and distrust for these reality shows as Delphine de Vigan displays in this novel.

In ‘Kids Run the Show’, young French woman Melanie Klaux started her foray into reality TV as a contestant on “Meet You in the Dark”.

“Would they find love? Three women and three men, all single, convened in a big villa, the men on one side, the women on the other. The only common room was a dark room equipped with infrared cameras, where the particpants were brought to get acquainted in total darkness. They went on to choose a partner they’d be alone together with in the dark room.”

That show lasted only a few episodes before it was understandably dropped. Now, several years later, Melanie is a young mother with two little pre-school children, Kimmy and Sammy. Melanie has set up a YouTube channel, “Happy Recess”, where she posts videos of her and her children on a daily basis. Her channel has become tremendously popular with millions of subscribers tuning in to YouTube to watch these videos. Now Melanie’s husband has quit his job to help with the videos since they make a very good living through company product placements in these videos. The children Kimmy and Sammy have become YouTube stars.

“And in every corner of the planet, hundreds of families were sharing their daily lives with thousands of viewers.”

But is being filmed constantly having adverse effects on these two small children?

One day the kids have a rare opportunity to play with the neighbor kids, and they play hide-and-seek. Sammy who is “it” looks all over for Kimmy but can’t find her. Has Kimmy hid herself really well or has she been kidnapped? When the parents can’t find her, they call the police. Clara Roussel is a young police officer, assigned to the case after Mélanie’s daughter Kimmy is abducted. Several days pass, and Kimmy has still not been found. Does the disappearance of Kimmy have anything to do with those YouTube videos?

I’m not sure that these YouTube family video channels are as big a problem as Delphine de Vigan makes them out to be, but it’s a great plot for a novel and is well executed.

They “have been confronted, from their earliest childhood, with demands no child should ever be subjected to: they are expected to be charming, promote products, respond to fans, manage their image, and so on. Today many of them are paying the bitter price for it all.”

Grade :     A

‘Based on a True Story’ by Delphine de Vigan   (2017) – 374 pages      Translated from the French by George Miller

In ‘Based on a True Story’, Delphine de Vigan deals with the notions of reality versus fiction.  It is brilliant, a novel for our time.  Should a writer write only memoirs about their own personal real experiences? Take these words from the mysterious woman L. who invades Delphine’s territory:

“People have had enough of well-constructed intrigue, clever plot hooks, and denouements… Take it from me, readers expect something different from literature and they’re right: they expect the Real, the authentic.  They want to be told about life, don’t you see? Literature mustn’t mistake its territory.” 

Actually ‘Based on a True Story’ is a horror story with an atmosphere of menace with a malevolent undercurrent.  The mysterious woman L. takes over Delphine’s life after Delphine has published her first successful novel.  L. makes impassioned pleas to Delphine to write a memoir instead of fiction, that nowadays people only want what’s real.  These pleas only leave Delphine with a severe case of writer’s block.  L. even takes over Delphine’s personal computer sending out an email to all of Delphine’s friends begging them not to contact or bother Delphine because she is busy writing.  She even signs Delphine’s name to the email.  This email leaves Delphine virtually isolated and unable to write.  There are certain traits of the obsessed fan in ‘Based on a True Story’ that remind me of Stephen King’s ‘Misery’.

Delphine does fight back:

“Listen carefully.  I’m going to tell you something: I have never written to please anyone and I have no intention of starting now…Because deep down writing is much more intimate and much more commanding than that.”

My best guess as to who is this mysterious woman L. is that she is a double, a doppelgänger, of Delphine.

‘Based on a True Story’ is exceptional because De Vigan has created a fiction, a clever haunting story, with herself as the main character.  Director Roman Polanski has made a movie from ‘Based on a True Story’ which also won the 2015 Prix Goncourt.

I have thought a lot about the Reality versus Fiction debate and have come out strongly on the side of Fiction (no surprise there).  I rarely read memoirs, finding them usually self-serving as is especially true of political memoirs.  Nothing on television seems so fake to me as reality TV shows. My view is that fiction gives writers the necessary distance to tell the larger truths about themselves and their characters.  I read fiction not for escape but to better understand the world and the people in it.

Grade:   A