A Woman's Story

Review

My journey with Ernaux continues. In this little memoir, Ernaux tracks her mother’s life from birth to death, and the impact it has on her. A sort of accompaniment to the previously published I Remain in Darkness, Ernaux further mines her experience of her mother’s death and broader impact on her life.

Several years ago, my mother had some sort of medical scare. The words “congestive heart failure” were mentioned. It is one of the few times I’ve burst into tears at work, having to move myself into an empty examination room to let it pass. It was probably the first time I contemplated that my mother could die. I have suppressed these thoughts now for years. Ernaux describes here that she keeps expecting her mother to turn a corner, to appear as though still alive, and feels her absence acutely in what she no longer has to do. I was forced to imagine my Sundays without calling my mom at 11am, which has been a constant habit now for a long time. Sometimes these calls are a mere hour if one of us is depressed (usually, me). Sometimes the calls are snippy, fighty. Sometimes they are sad. Sometimes I am drunk on wine and horribly depressed, unable to hear any reassurance or hope. Sometimes my mom is reliving childhood trauma in a way that I wish I could not hear, but in which I know she has no outlet for otherwise. We complain about work, we talk about what we’ve watched or read that week. We talk about the difficult years of my childhood, when all of us were so stressed as to be barely functional. Sometimes I feel as though I don’t have the energy to have these calls on particular Sundays. But I can’t imagine them ending.

Ernaux often makes me think about my mom and her life. I feel strongly that she would connect to this book especially, but I wonder if (given her mom’s current stage in life), it is not the right time to introduce it to her. I don’t know.

This is the risk with Ernaux. Her writing is so clear and direct that it may cut the reader and spill tears. That’s why we read.

Note on Location

The major towns/villages figuring in this book are , Yvetot, Lisieux, and Pontoise.

Yvetot is home to about 11,000 people today. It is where Ernaux’s mother grew up, where Ernaux grew up, and where Ernaux’s mother is buried.

Ernaux mentions that her mother sometimes ‘made pilgrimage’ to Lisieux. It is 55 miles from Yvetot.

Pontoise, where Ernaux’s mother died, is 96 miles from Yvetot, just north of Paris.

Yvetot is about 4600 miles from my hometown. I currently live about 750 miles from my hometown.

Notes

• p25 - One year, on Whit Saturday, I met my aunt M — on the way back from school. It was her day off and as usual she was going into town with a shopping bag full of empty bottles. She kissed me on both cheeks, swaying slightly, incapable of uttering a single word. My writing would never have been what it is had I not met my aunt that day.
• p30 - I believe I am writing about my mother because it is my turn to bring her into the world.
• p47 - Because she feared people wouldn’t love her for what she was, she hoped they would love her for what she could give.
• p50 - At first, she wasn’t as happy as we had expected. All of a sudden, her shopkeeper’s life was over. No more financial worries and long working hours, but on the other hand, no more familiar faces and chatting to customers. Worst of all, maybe, she no longer had the satisfaction of earning ‘her own’ money. In Annecy she was just a ‘granny’. Nobody knew her in town and she only had us to talk to. Her world had suddenly shrunk and lost its sparkle. Now she felt she was a nobody.
• p64 - And yet sometimes she knew: ‘I’m afraid my condition is irreversible.’ Or else she remembered: ‘I did everything I could to make my daughter happy and she wasn’t any happier for it.’
• p67 - It also occurred to me that one day in the twenty-first century, I would be one of the women who sit waiting for their dinner, folding and unfolding their napkins, here or somewhere else.