"Catgut" By Anna Gavalda

This short story is a very graphic story, I thought.  It is about a doctor, Dr. Lejaret, who gets a phone call from the Billebaudes farm, which is down the road from her.  She ends up going over there and the two men who live there rape her.  She then goes and kills the men who raped her by drugging them and very gruesomely killing them.  With the first guy, she took her surgical blade and took out his testicles.  For the man who telephoned her, she grafted his balls below his Adam's apple.  Yes, this is a very gross story, but I think it is trying give the readers a message. 

"They seriously hurt me.  That's what happened.  I really don't want to say it again, but I'm going to repeat it for those of you who didn't hear me:  they seriously hurt me."  While reading, I found this passage to be the most interesting.  In this passage you can tell how bad the doctor is hurting almost to the point where you can feel her pain.  These two men took advantage of her and "seriously hurt" her.  Reading this passage gets the reader to feel sympathetic towards the doctor.  I know while I read it I felt sorry for her because I don't think anyone should go through such an awful thing like that.  The fact that she repeated they seriously hurt her twice really caught my attention.  She wants to make it known how much she was hurt, both emotionally and physically.

I think the reason the author wrote this story is to allow readers to be exposed to rape and show them that it is okay to open up and talk to someone about it.  I thought this story was important because it actually had a purpose to it.  I say this because it had a strong point to it which people my struggle with today - being a victim of rape.  Many people who struggle with this are afraid to open up about it until many years later.  The author may have struggled with this herself, we don't know that for sure but it is possible.  While reading this story, I was wondering why the author wrote this? Is it a story about herself or someone she knows? Many questions come to mind from reading this story and we may never know the answers.