la vie d'avant

la vie d'avant

Simone Dubois used to own every room she walked into.
Television star. Paris sweetheart. A woman lit from within, until the fire turned on her.

Now she wakes up on concrete behind a Nashville dive bar, bruised, barefoot, half-poisoned, and chased by the ghost of the life she lost. The Beforelife. La vie d’avant.

Out here, survival isn’t poetic, it’s feral. It’s withdrawal sweats, alleyway prophets, government cheese that never melts, and men who take more than they offer. It’s crawling through the wreckage of addiction with your teeth clenched and your pride long gone. Every day she lives is another day she didn’t earn.

But when a city sweep lands Simone in a detox hold and her estranged sister is forced back into the story, the past she’s been running from finally catches up. Old wounds open. Old failures breathe again. And “family” stops being a memory and becomes a reckoning.

la vie d’avant is a brutal, unflinching portrait of addiction, homelessness, sisterhood, and the wreckage we carry long after the world stops clapping for us. Told with the dirty realism of Euphoria, the emotional gravity of Cherry, and the unvarnished honesty of street-level memoir, this novel drags you through the gutter and dares you to keep breathing.

Because for some people, redemption isn’t the point.
Survival is.