She answered the door, beaming with welcome. Inside the house was filled with cold, clear light. It was uncluttered and tidy, modestly and tastefully furnished with antiques, yet it was evident that very little had changed here: The small, spare kitchen where she prepared coffee for us was a kitchen from 40 years ago. Yet the house seemed expressive of a double achievement: her rise from the café-epicerie and her stoical resistance of the temptation to falsify or adorn the facts that surround her. We sat at the table in the sunny dining room. She talked about the imminent Nobel Prize ceremony, for which she needed to travel to Stockholm. Her main concern was her descent, before the audience, of a long staircase: At 82, she was worried she’d fall over. We asked whether someone couldn’t accompany her down, and she instantly looked startled. Later, I realized that this well-meaning suggestion was rather tactless: Her autonomy, her uncompromising independence from everyone and everything she has met with in life, was the reason she was going to Stockholm in the first place.
When she talked about her age, and the handful of years she imagines are left to her, the luminosity of her countenance was arresting, and I was struck by the sheer aliveness of this creature and by her undimmed force of inquiry. The question, she said, is how to live when life is nearly over. What, in that context, can life mean? A few months earlier, she and her son David made a documentary, “Les Années Super 8,” that is a collage of the home movies of their family life shot by her then-husband, Philippe, from 1972 to 1981. The images, so indelibly dated, put the past into a long and almost unbearable perspective. Talking now about the film, and about the clarity with which it summons back her past selves as a young wife and mother, she recalled the secret life that the images did not show: her determination, amid the detritus and preoccupations of conventional family life, to record her inner world in writing.
She wrote her first novel, “Cleaned Out,” in secret and mailed it to a publisher in Paris, giving only the address of the school where she was teaching at the time. She didn’t even enclose a cover letter. The weeks during which she waited for a response were filled with the weighty sense of what she had done. Talking about it now, all these years later, she even recalled the dates: of the mailing of the parcel, of the stages of the wait — fevered expectation followed by doubt followed by the beginnings of resignation — and of the receipt finally of the letter of acceptance. When the news came, she realized that this was not to be a covert contract with the world, of news smuggled out of her domestic entrapment in an envelope — the people who knew her, most of all her husband and mother, would also read it. She feared her husband’s reaction, sure enough, to this written betrayal of their shared life, but it was, she says now, her mother’s response to the book that was in fact the only one that mattered to her.
Her mother had come to live with them after her father’s death, and she took the book with her into her bedroom and closed the door. Ernaux recalls going to that door several times during the night and seeing the light still burning through the crack. In the morning, her mother came down to breakfast and didn’t say a word about what she had read, a silence that signaled her acceptance of the situation. It is extraordinary that this tough and humble woman, whose existence had been led under the severest constraints of a reality in which the breaking of social codes could have catastrophic consequences, could approve her daughter’s actions in publicly smashing the bourgeois veneer of her family life.
Proud as her mother was, Ernaux says now, of her daughter’s achievement in securing for herself the undreamed-of accouterments of a conventional middle-class existence, she was prouder of her writing. In the past, on discovering them, she had burned Ernaux’s diaries and notebooks, doubtless out of terror at what their content implied for her daughter’s future. But in the official acceptance by a publisher she recognized legitimacy.
