He opened the door, beaming with welcome. The interior of the house was filled with a cold, clear light. It was clean and tidy, modestly and tastefully furnished with antiques, but it was evident that very little had changed here: the small spare kitchen where she made us coffee was a kitchen from 40 years ago. However, the house seemed to express a double achievement: his rise from the cafe-epicerie and her stoic resistance to the temptation to falsify or embellish the facts that surround her. We sit at the table in the sunny dining room. She spoke of the impending Nobel Prize ceremony, for which she needed to travel to Stockholm. Her main concern was the descent, before the public, of a long staircase: at 82, she was afraid of falling. We asked her if someone couldn’t see her downstairs, and she instantly seemed startled. Later, I realized that this well-intentioned suggestion was tactless: her autonomy, her uncompromising independence from everyone and everything she had encountered in her life, was the reason she was going to Stockholm on first place.
When she spoke of her age and the handful of years she imagines she has left, the luminosity of her countenance was dazzling, and I was struck by this creature’s vivacity and unwavering inquisitiveness. The question, she said, is how to live when life is about to end. What, in this context, can life mean? A few months earlier, she and her son David made a documentary, “Les Années Super 8,” which is a collage of home movies of her family life shot by her then-husband, Philippe, from 1972 to 1981. The images, so indelibly dated, they put the past into long and almost unbearable perspective. Speaking now of the film, and of the clarity with which it evokes her past as a young wife and mother, she recalled the secret life that the pictures did not show: her determination, amid the debris and worries of conventional family life, to record her inner world in writing
He wrote his first novel, “Clean”, in secret and mailed it to a publisher in Paris, giving only the address of the school where he was teaching at the time. She didn’t even attach a cover letter. The weeks during which she waited for an answer were filled with the weight of what she had done. Talking about it now, all these years later, he even remembered the dates: of the sending of the package, of the stages of waiting—feverish waiting followed by doubt followed by the beginnings of resignation—and finally receiving the letter. acceptance. When the news came, she realized it wasn’t going to be a covert contract with the world, of news smuggled out of her domestic trap in an envelope: the people who knew her, especially her husband and mother, they would read it too. . She feared her husband’s reaction, of course, to this written betrayal of their shared life, but it was her, she says now, her mother’s response to her book that was all that mattered to her.
Her mother had gone to live with them after her father’s death, and she took the book into her bedroom and closed the door. Ernaux remembers going to that door several times during the night and seeing the light that continued to shine through the crack. In the morning, his mother came down to breakfast and she didn’t say a word of what she had read, a silence that indicated her acceptance of the situation. It is extraordinary that this tough and humble woman, whose existence had been led under the most severe limitations of a reality in which breaking social codes could have catastrophic consequences, could approve of her daughter’s performance by publicly breaking the bourgeois veneer of his family life.
Proud as her mother was, Ernaux now says, of her daughter’s achievement in securing for herself the unsuspected accoutrements of a conventional middle-class existence, she was prouder of her writing. In the past, upon discovering them, she had burned Ernaux’s journals and notebooks, no doubt out of terror at what their contents implied for her daughter’s future. But in official acceptance by a publisher she recognized legitimacy.
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