A Woman's Story

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The subtle differences between the two worlds become even more glaring when the mother moves in with her daughter. To a house where people read Le Monde and listen to Bach. There, where Ernaux lives with her husband and two sons, new battle lines emerge for the well-rehearsed mother-daughter skirmishes. The demands Annie Ernaux makes on herself as a daughter collide painfully with the demands she makes on her mother. Again and again, she draws individual experiences to a collective, general human level. This leads her, for example, to the following beautiful conclusion: After a few years, these authors ( Alice Munro in 2013 and Olga Tokarczuk in 2018) won Nobel Prize in literature, and my friends had to agree that they couldn't at least call these books useless. I actually never recommended these books to them. They snatched my copy of these books from my possession when they heard that I loved these books. The above two experiences taught me a valuable lesson: to be careful while discussing books with my friends.

Okura şirin gözükmek gibi bir derdi olmamasını çok seviyorum kendisinin. Annesine karşı duyduğu, zaman zaman acımasızlığa varan öfkesini gizlemeye yahut meşrulaştırmaya hiç çalışmıyor - ki bu yakınlıktaki ilişkiler zaten aslında karşılıklı haksızlıklardan örülmemiş midir? Anne-kız ilişkisine çok içkin bir şey bence o öfke, kıskançlık, haksızlık hâli - hatta bir tür samimiyet seviyesi gibi. "Canını acıtma hakkı"nı ayrıcalıklı biçimde elinde tutabilmek... Kutsamadan, yüceltmeden, gerçek hâliyle gösteriyor bize ilişkiyi ve pekala bu biçimiyle de güzel olabileceğini ispatlıyor. Somewhere along the way, and without losing the impact of specific details, A Woman’s Storytranscends the individual. Ernaux finds the truth of her mothers life, and it turns out to be not one thing, but the whole story.” –St. Petersburg Times It charts a poor upbringing in Normandy, marriage, motherhood, work as a small shopkeeper, boredom in retirement, Alzheimer’s and death in a geriatric hospital. The descriptions in relation to Alzheimer’s are well described and poignant. Effectively it’s a portrait of two women tied by a biological bond. The relationship was a difficult one at times and writing it was not easy: There was a soul with me at one moment, and then there wasn't,” she tells Woman's Hour ( listen here). “It left me.”She took pills to terminate the pregnancy, which didn’t work - so a nurse had to remove the foetus. Un romanzo in cui la delicatezza del racconto è superata solo dalla tragedia umana, descritta nel modo più diretto. Argomento: la vita della madre, dalla nascita alla morte.

The prose of the book is quite straightforward like a biography but it is not a typical biography, though it has a clear, poignant narrative but it’s neither a novel, it is a remembrance of the life history of a strong, radiant woman through the history of war and economic crisis, from a sociological and literary perspective. The narrative has a rhythmic flow like music with each note sharply detached from the other, the author though writes about her mother but she has been able to cultivate restrained and detached prose, deeply moving account of life and death, youth and age, imaginations, and reality, a poignant love story. I remember reading once in Kamala Suraiyya Das's book that the most challenging aspect of writing memoirs is to write about our family members who are alive. In this book, Annie Ernaux shows us why it is equally challenging to write about our family members who have passed away. My mother, was the one with the proud, violent temper. She was aware that she had belonged to the lower class, and she resented it, refusing to be judged according to her social status alone. She would often say of the rich, ‘They’re no better than us’. She was an attractive blonde with gray eyes, pleasantly plump, and bursting with health. She read anything she could lay hands on. She enjoyed singing the latest popular songs, making up, and going out with friends to the cinema”. I am glad that I read this book by Annie Ernaux, as it has a universal appeal, and I can fearlessly discuss and recommend it to anyone. This is a book you should never miss if you are someone who loves to read memoirs or if you have someone who has Alzheimer's disease in your family.I really liked the book; as with her book about her father, I was led to think hard (and make some notes) about my own mother, who is the person I loved more than anyone else in the world, a woman of contradictions herself. When she left university Amanda went on to take a public role in the church and has subsequently helped other women in similar situations. L’avevo vista pochi giorni prima di partire. L’avevo trovata male: sempre lucida, ma fisicamente prosciugata, ritirata, rimpicciolita. Ho avuto l’impressione che vivere le fosse ormai di gran fatica. E forse, soprattutto, una grande noia. Ricordo che mi ero augurato per lei quello che poi è successo qualche giorno dopo. Why does she write it, that’s a profound question? The emptiness we feel our bond with someone we love is severed, at least in this world, does it prompt us to say about it so that we may fill up the enormous void. Or perhaps we write about it so that the eternal events such as death may be helped to get merge with the past, to be one with our past, so that our turbulent soul may find solace as then it would become like any other events of our past. The author says that more objective aspect of her writing involves a cross between family history and sociology, reality and fiction; it could be seen as a literary venture as its purpose to find out the truth about her mother, a truth that can be conveyed only by words, and perhaps a truth which can be explored through words, only. She believes she is writing to her mother into the world, she writes for people to understand what she wrote for herself to make the thought bearable to her. My husband and I had the same level of education, we discussed Sartre and freedom, watched Antonioni's 'Those Who Play with Love' at the cinema, held the same left-wing views, didn't come from the same world. In his, one was not necessarily rich, but one had studied, had something clever to say on every subject, played bridge. My husband's mother, the same age as mine, had a slim body, a smooth face, well-groomed hands."

Kerry' who is now 28 had an abortion when she was 18. She did not talk to anyone about her plans - not because she felt ashamed, but because she was so sure of her decision. As I write, I see her, sometimes as a ‘good’, sometimes as a ‘bad’ mother. To get away from these contrasting views, which come from my earliest childhood, I try to describe and explain her life as if I were writing about someone else’s mother, and a daughter, who wasn’t me”. This article was first published in 2019. It has been updated following the overturning of Roe v Wade in the US. Thus starts Annie Ernaux's slim book in which she memorialises her mother and their relationship, strikingly echoing Albert Camus's The Stranger. Less than two weeks after her mother's death in 1986, Annie Ernaux begins writing about her, she reconstructs her mother's life and death in her usual sober and precise manner. Veering between tenderness and sobriety, Annie Ernaux is in search for truth. Fragment by fragment, paragraph by paragraph, she works her way through her mother's life. She assembles individual scenes into a life that is at once individual and symptomatic - of a particular time, a particular region, a particular class. La Ernaux sembra mettere la sordina al proprio disagio e alle implicite rivendicazioni dei suoi altri scritti per lasciare la scena a questa donna senza storia ( " Per me mia madre è priva di storia. C'è sempre stata") e farla diventare reale.I just felt that I didn’t want anybody else’s opinion. I felt I knew how other people would handle it. I felt like it was my decision and I didn’t want to conflate that with other people’s ideas,” she says.