Jean Guilda - Guilda: elle et moi

1979, French, Jean Guilda,

Original title: "Guilda: elle et moi" (Guilda: her and me) by Jean Guilda.

There are autobiographies that recount. Then there are those that seduce, provoke, and undress not only the author but also the reader’s assumptions about gender, fame, and selfhood. Guilda: Elle et moi, Her and Me, published in 1979, is not merely the life story of Jean Guida de Mortellaro, the dazzling performer better known as Guilda. It is a theatrical memoir staged on the page, a tango between masculine and feminine, public and private, illusion and intimacy. 

 

Written in the voice of both Jean and his stage persona, Elle et moi stands as one of the most compelling autobiographical experiments in the drag canon. Guilda does not begin the book with childhood nostalgia or linear chronology. He opens with an invocation: to glamour, to freedom, to the goddess within. Immediately, we are ushered into his duality, not as a contradiction to be resolved, but as a sacred duet. The memoir’s conceit is brilliant in its theatricality: two voices, two identities, two lovers under one skin. “Elle” is not merely a costume or a role. She is an entity with her own opinions, longings, and grudges. Together, elle et moi narrate the evolution of Guilda as if co-authoring a mythic, sensual epic that refuses to obey binary storytelling. 

 

The writing is lush, confessional, and often wickedly humorous. Jean recalls early encounters with beauty and danger in pre-war France, his hunger for sequins amid the rubble of postwar Europe, and his brushes with death, most notably, his narrow escape from deportation to Buchenwald. These darker moments are not buried or sanitized. Instead, they add an urgent depth to his later flamboyance. Guilda’s glamour was never escapism. It was an act of defiance against fascism, conformity, and personal grief. When Guilda arrives in North America, the tone of the memoir shifts into a bright, fast-paced cabaret of celebrity, scandal, and velvet curtains. His rise in Montreal’s nightlife scene reads like a dream told through a rhinestone filter. Night after night, Guilda dazzled audiences with his impersonations, Dietrich, Piaf, Monroe, yet he insists that what he offered was never mimicry. It was metamorphosis. The memoir emphasizes that drag, for Guilda, was not an attempt to be a woman. It was a way to show what gender could be when liberated from rules. 

 

What makes Guilda: Elle et moi endure is not only the celebrity gossip, the fashion details, or the backstage drama, though there’s plenty of that, it’s the emotional honesty beneath the spectacle. The reader encounters a man in love with his children, trying to be a father while navigating a queer identity in an era hostile to deviation. He writes tenderly about romantic relationships, including those marked by secrecy, cultural difference, or loss. He speaks of his bisexuality not as a scandal but as a simple fact of the heart’s wandering desires. 

 

The prose, while occasionally indulgent, never loses its performative flair. Like Guilda onstage, the book is both polished and unpredictable. At moments, it resembles a diary, at others, a manifesto. There are passages where Guilda argues passionately for the artistic legitimacy of drag, long before it would be discussed in mainstream discourse. He rejects shame, scorns pity, and insists on joy as a political force. The memoir, radical for its time, asks not for tolerance but for applause. In juxtaposition to Julien Cadieux’s later 2014 documentary Guilda: Elle est bien dans ma peau, which paints Guilda in shimmering archival layers, the memoir is a rawer, more intimate striptease. The film is the cabaret curtain drawn back. 

 

The book is what happens after the makeup is removed, or perhaps, what happens when it’s applied with trembling hands. Toward its end, Elle et moi becomes almost philosophical. Guilda muses on aging, legacy, and the fragility of constructed identities. He anticipates the day the public might forget him, but he writes without bitterness. His life has been a masterpiece of appearances, but the memoir insists that underneath every illusion was a truth more vivid than reality itself. In the final pages, “Elle” and “moi” merge, not into a conclusion, but into an embrace. The separation between persona and person dissolves in a way that feels like both closure and rebirth. Guilda doesn’t seek to resolve the question of who he really is. He simply offers us a stage full of selves, each one dazzling, wounded, triumphant. 

 

Guilda: Elle et moi remains a landmark in queer literature, not just for its content, but for its audacity of voice. It invites the reader to witness a life lived as a performance of survival, beauty, and invention. It is not a memoir written from behind a mask. It is a memoir that invites the reader to try one on. For those drawn to memoirs that blur the line between autobiography and performance art, between confession and costume, Elle et moi is a gem. It speaks to anyone who has ever crafted themselves into someone stronger, more radiant, more resistant, if only for a moment under the lights. Jean Guida de Mortellaro may have passed in 2012, but in Guilda: Elle et moi, he lives on, not as a relic of another era, but as a reminder that sometimes, the truest self is the one you create with feathers, paint, and fire.

Available via librairielacargaison

and Wikipedia

Photos via YouTube.

Other publications about Jean Guilda: