The Other Girl

Review

Ernaux’s short book exploring the knowledge of her sister, unknown to her and deceased before she was ever contemplated, let alone born. A chance overhearing shadows her life.

I appreciated, as always, Ernaux’s cutting and raw writing. There is a little less in this one for me to grab onto, but I think we’re lucky to have the opportunity to go along with her as she processes these ideeas.

Notes

• p12 - According to the civil registry, you’re my sister. You have the same surname as me – Duchesne, my ‘maiden name’.
  • TB: I have surely seen ‘maiden name’ in print before, but perhaps I’ve never seen it offset in single-quotes, which demand the reader stop and think about it. Maiden name. What an odd thing to say, and an odd concept.
• p16 - In the end, she says of you, she was nicer than the other one ¶ The other one is me.
• p19 - Sixty years later, I still stumble over the word nice and try to untangle the meanings it had in relation to you, and to them, though the meaning was immediately, blindingly clear in the sense that it changed my place in the family in a second. Between them and me, suddenly there was you, invisible and adored, while I was pushed aside, pushed away to make room for you. Thrust into the shadows while you soared above above in the light of eternity. I was compared – me, the incomparable, the only child. Reality in an affair of words, a system of exclusions. More/Less. Or/And. Before/After. To be or not to be. Life or death.
• p21 - (Am I writing to resurrect you and then kill you again?)
• p23 - Having started to talk about you, she couldn’t stop. She couldn’t not go on until the end, finding in the story of your death, as told to the young mother hearing it for the first time, the consolation of a form of resurrection.
  • TB: bold mine.
• p28 - In my room at my parents’ home, I pinned up this sentence by Claudel, carefully copied onto a big sheet of paper, the edges burnt with a lighter, like a pact with Satan: ‘Yes, I believe that I did not come into the world for nothing and that there is something in me that the world cannot do without.’
• p45 - I was aware of my advantages as an only child, a child born after the death of another, the pampered object of a worried solicitude. He wanted me above all to be happy, she wanted me to be a good person, and, within the family and in our working-class neighbourhood, their desires added p to an enviable existence for me – that of a privileged girl who was never sent to fetch the bread and who said ‘I don’t serve’ to customers, on the grounds that she was continuing her education. You were their sorrow. I knew I was their hope, the source of complications, of events, from the First Communion to the bac, their success. I was their future.
• p54 - In 2003, in my journal, picturing the scene of the story, I wrote: ‘I’m not nice like her, I’m excluded. So I will not be cut out for love, but for solitude and intelligence.’