French author explores an intimate, complex relationship with hyper-personal objectivity
A Woman’s Story is Annie Ernaux’s affecting attempt to honour a woman she loved deeply. Photograph: Alain Jocard/AFP via Getty Images’s account of her mother’s life. To her fans, it will be a joy, though it will be anathema to those heathens who remain unconvinced by her oeuvre, which consists of an accretion of memoirs, each focusing on different aspects of her life.
This reminded me of a time when, driving to west Cork, my father quietly endured hours of a CD of Milton’s Paradise Lost, so as not to hamper my attempts at self-education. Ernaux’s genius, here as elsewhere, is in using her own experiences to bring into consciousness our painful unknown knowns, through a deeply relatable, hyper-personal objectivity.
Writer Maggie Armstrong: ‘I wanted to be a wastrel. I had no ambitions ever, for anything. Is that a symptom of the age?’ The book was undertaken in the immediate aftermath of her death and, in writing it, Ernaux mourns the intimacy they shared. It was a closeness hampered, but ultimately undamaged, by all the usual resentments and conformities that can come between mothers and daughters: “We had gone back to addressing each other in that particular tone of speech – a cross between exasperation and mutual resentment – which led people to believe, wrongly, that we were always arguing.
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