Writings about Life – Annie Ernaux

A middle-length book here by Annie Ernaux in which she tells her mother’s biography as best she can. I read the previous book “A Man’s Place” about her father, and like in that book, the event here that inspires the book is her mother’s death. Her mother outlived her father by a number of years, but also begin to deteriorate further and further because of Alzheimer’s disease. This narrowing of her life and consciousness has some parallel with Ernaux’s own sense of loss of her mother as she began to move away from her parents’ world of merchant class business and upbringing (where education might otherwise mean being more sound with economic understanding), and into the world of a more liberal, intellectual world. Similar to the book about her father, this education becomes a driving force and an accidental wedge between the two women. It’s not an entirely tense or dramatic wedge, nor does Ernaux feel remorse about it, only that it happened.

Possession

A short and almost violent narration of the experience of obsession, resentment, pain, and jealousy of a painful breakup where the other person has moved on. Annie Ernaux’s narrator here begins to obsess with the loss of this relationship and like a lot of people acts this obsession through an intense voyeurism of her ex’s new girlfriend, an academic that Ernaux is able to identify from a series of obliques clues, call her office, and even seek her out on the street. Never in this book is there is “we all know this is wrong” couching that I think predominates American writing, and worse, writing about writing. This is pain acting out. There’s not even a real sense of the ex betraying our narrator, only that the pain exists and the pain creates action and choices. It’s refreshing because if you’ve found yourself in these situations, and if you’ve acted out in any kind of way, there’s already a shame and self-judgment that occurs and follows your actions. You put yourself through these feelings and well, we don’t need the narrator here to do that for us. That shame is real and valid (and ultimately good) but the failure to allow destructive choices to just be, without comment except seeking to understand is lacking from a lot of writing.

A Simple Passion

Written in the throes and aftermath of an affair with a younger, married foreign man, this book illustrates the utter decimation of self, the complete possessiveness of love, of love affairs, and the complete takeover of a life a fraught, but precious affair can have.

Written in diary entries we find Annie Ernaux’s narrator totally subsumed by an affair with a married man who finds himself in France for some business or government stay of several months. Willing to drop everything in an instant to meet up with him, to make a supply run for cigarettes and whiskey and nuts, willing to wait for days on end to get the smallest of satisfaction, and willing change one’s life around for fear of missing a connection, this book illustrates a particular kind of obsession. I couldn’t make a life or a marriage on it, but if you’ve ever been completely captured in this way, I am not sure I can recommend it (but definitely the book) but it’s an intense and amazing and devastating place to be.

Happening

Now years on after the legalization of abortion in France, Annie Ernaux narrates her own unsanctioned abortion. It’s not as horrifying an experience as it might have been, as she was able to find someone who was as good as their word, but the fraught danger of her experience, the terror and isolation of needing this medical procedure and not being able to obtain it legally, and the paranoia of her experience and of the various people she brings into it is amazing to read. In the US we’re clearly approaching some kind of precipice as it comes to abortion. I don’t know if the same is true in France, but throughout many of Ernaux’s writing, there’s a looming phantom in Jan-Marie Le Pen, so who knows given his daughter has made a surge in years past. Some stray thoughts. This book is brilliantly harrowing without being apologetic. Abortions are only horrifying when they’re dangerous or unwanted, so to write about them without remorse or couching it in dishonest handwringing is nice. Men see a pregnant women as inherently sexual and have no qualms about making that known, if they unattached. There’s a lot of cowards in this book, and only a few heroes. It feels quite vital.

“In his writings, Proust suggests that our memory is separate from us, residing in the ocean breeze or the smells of early autumn—things linked to the earth that recur periodically, confirming the permanence of mankind. For me and no doubt many of my contemporaries, memories are associated with ephemeral things such as a fashionable belt or a summer hit and therefore the act of remembering can do nothing to reaffirm my sense of identity or continuity. It can only confirm the fragmented nature of my life and the belief that I belong to history.”

“Maybe the true purpose of my life is for my body, my sensations and my thoughts to become writing, in other words, something intelligible and universal, causing my existence to merge into the lives and heads of other people.”

“Naturally I feel no shame in writing these things because of the time which separates the moment when they are written–when only I can see them–from the moment when they will be read by other people, a moment which I feel will never come. By then I could have had an accident or died; a war or a revolution could have broken out. This delay makes it possible for me to write today, in the same way I used to lie in the scorching sun for a whole day at sixteen, or make love without contraceptives at twenty: without thinking about the consequences”

“Sometimes I wonder if the purpose of my writing is to find out whether other people have done or felt the same things or, if not, for them to consider experiencing such things as normal. Maybe I would also like them to live out these very emotions in turn, forgetting that they had once read about them somewhere.”