My Mother's House
The companion memoir this book completes, set in the same Burgundy household.
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Sido
by Colette
Colette's portrait of her mother — and, around her, her father and wild siblings — often called the finest thing she wrote.
- 1930
About Colette
The story, briefly
Spoiler-freeSido is Colette's memoir of her mother, Sidonie Colette. The book is careful about the name in its title: Colette writes that one person in the world called her mother Sido, and that person was her father. Everyone else, neighbours included, said Madame Colette. Written in her late fifties, long after her mother's death, it is a portrait in three parts — Sido, then the father, then the siblings — of the household in Burgundy where Colette grew up. Its subject is above all her mother's rare attention to the living world: to weather, gardens, animals, and the people around her. Published in 1930, it is the companion to My Mother's House and, for many readers, the summit of Colette's work. (What's inside is described below.)
The story, in more detail
Sido deepens the memory-writing Colette began in My Mother's House, but it is a more considered and more elegiac book. Where the earlier collection gathered scattered sketches, Sido is organized around three figures — the mother, the father, the children — and returns to them with the confidence of a writer who has found her greatest subject. Sido had been dead for years when Colette wrote it, and the distance shows as tenderness rather than grief.
The portrait of Sido is the book's heart: a provincial mother of unusual intelligence and feeling, alive to the garden and the sky, impatient with convention, and bound to her children and her plants with the same fierce attention. Around her, the reserved father — a wounded former army officer whose devotion to his wife the book gradually reveals — and the siblings Colette called les sauvages, the wild ones, fill in the world she came from.
Sido is short and dense, closer to a prose poem than a conventional memoir, and it is the book most often named when readers argue for Colette as one of the major French writers of the century. It is best read with My Mother's House, which it completes.
What's inside
The book is a portrait rather than a narrative, built in three movements. The first and longest is Sido herself — Colette's mother, watching her barometer and her garden, writing letters, tending animals and children with a restless, loving attention that the whole book takes as its measure of how to be alive to the world. Colette recovers her not through anecdote alone but through the quality of her looking.
The second movement turns to the father, the quiet, one-legged former soldier whose deep attachment to Sido the family only half understood, and the third to the siblings — les sauvages, the 'savages' — the older half-brother and the others who ran wild through the same house and countryside. Together the three parts assemble the world of Colette's childhood around the mother at its center. There is no plot to spoil; the book's movement is one of memory and love, closing the portrait Colette began in My Mother's House.
Why we recommend it
Often called her finest book
Sido is the work most cited when readers make the case for Colette as one of the major French writers of the century.
A mother as a way of seeing
Its subject is less events than Sido's rare attention to weather, garden, and living things — attention Colette inherited and made into prose.
The completion of a pair
It returns to the household of My Mother's House with greater depth and elegy, closing Colette's portrait of where she came from.
What this book explores
The people in its pages
Sido
Colette's mother, Sidonie — intelligent, unconventional, alive to garden and sky and the people around her. The book's center and its measure of how to live.
The Captain
Colette's father, a one-legged former army officer whose quiet, deep devotion to Sido the book slowly uncovers.
Les Sauvages
The siblings — the 'wild ones' — who ran loose through the same house and countryside, filling out the world of Colette's childhood.
Bring it to book club
- Colette makes her mother's way of looking at the world the measure of the whole book. What does Sido teach her, and us, about attention?
- The father is revealed slowly, mostly through his devotion to Sido. Why does Colette keep him at the edges until late?
- Sido was long dead when Colette wrote this. How does that distance shape the book's tenderness?
Timeline
1922
My Mother's House introduces the figure of Sido, Colette's mother.
1930
Sido is published — Colette's fuller portrait of her mother, father, and siblings, often called her finest work.
Book editions
Hardcover
- Hardcover
- 1930
Paperback
- Paperback
Ebook
- Ebook
Reader reviews
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Break of Day
The novel built around Sido's own letters, in which the mother becomes a model for renunciation.
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The Ripening Seed
Colette's fiction of youth and the natural world, close in tenderness to these memoirs.
Read our takeSido: frequently asked questions
Who wrote Sido?
Colette. Sido was published in 1930, when she was in her late fifties, as a memoir of her mother and her Burgundy childhood.
Who was Sido?
Sido was Colette's father's name for his wife, Sidonie Colette — the writer records that he was the only person in the world who used it. She was a provincial Burgundy woman of unusual intelligence and feeling, and the presiding figure of Colette's memory-writing.
What is the book Sido about?
It is a portrait in three parts — the mother, the father, and the wild siblings — of the household Colette grew up in, centered on her mother's rare attention to the natural world.
How does it relate to My Mother's House?
Sido is the companion to My Mother's House (1922), returning to the same house and family with greater depth and elegy. The two memoirs are usually read, and often published, together.
Is Sido considered Colette's best book?
Many readers and critics think so. It is the work most often named in the case for Colette as one of the major French writers of the twentieth century.