By Kohinoor Dasgupta
THIS is a different sort of memoir. Early in the book, feeling a pang, we lose the girl in the photograph. We so liked her! Being lifelong readers and having faced our own vanishings, we resolutely turn the pages of the "We” years. "She” was softer on our anxieties about our own years. "She”, we know, reached out to millions of readers and, in 2022, won the Nobel Prize for Literature. We are heartened by success stories, although Annie Ernaux will judge us if we weigh her years in those inane terms. Still, Ernaux’s hard-won achievements in writing fill us with joy, whereas the tone of the "je collectif” is despondent when taking stock of (in democracies) collective choices that created situations of conflict, rapacity, dehumanization and alienation. "We” go on churning after "she” wound up her record in 2006. We continue to be battered by politics and commerce. Within seventeen years, we have become, in addition to what Ernaux has described, some stealthy corporation’s big data, our illnesses, our private conversations and our personal choices, simple (which toothpaste?) to life-changing (how many children?), even our use of language (how many times we use particular words) making big bucks for someone else, someone godlike in remoteness and power. Algorithms ignore us unless we belong to a herd of lavishly “liked” and imitated (envied) humans. Otherwise, we are only useful to "smart" snoops as fodder for the next streaming pot-boiler.
Throughout the memoir, Ernaux, born in September 1940, in Lillebonne, France, points to the steady chipping away from the true character of the women’s struggle. Living in the drastically altered reality scripted by the US Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision, a majority of American women (polls, polls), would appreciate the despairing irony in the following excerpt from The Years.
“Women, more than ever, [these were the mid-1980s] were a closely watched group whose behaviors, tastes, and desires were subject to assiduous discourse and uneasy, triumphant attention. They were now deemed to "have it all” and "be everywhere”. Girls "did better at school than boys.” As usual people looked for signs of emancipation in women’s bodies, in their sexual and sartorial daring. The fact that they talked about "cruising guys”, discussed their fantasies, and wondered aloud in Elle if they were "good in bed” was proof of their freedom and their equality with men. The perpetual display of their breasts and thighs in advertising was supposed to be construed as a tribute to feminine beauty. Feminism was a vengeful, humorless old ideology that young women no longer needed, and viewed with condescension. They did not doubt their own strength or their equality. (But they still read more novels than men, as if they needed to give their lives an imaginary shape.) "Thank you, men, for loving women,” read a headline in a women’s magazine. The struggle of women sank into oblivion. It was the only struggle that had not been officially revived in collective memory.
With the pill they had become the sole rulers of their lives, but word hadn’t got out yet.
We, who had undergone kitchen-table abortions, who had divorced and believed our struggle to free ourselves would be of use to others, were now overwhelmed by fatigue. We no longer knew if the women’s revolution had really happened.”
The Years, a bestseller in France when published in 2008, was translated into English by Alison L. Strayer in 2017. In her Note at the end of the book, Strayer draws attention to its form, which is the result of Ernaux’s quest for it to be:
“a slippery narrative, composed in an unremitting continuous tense, absolute, devouring the present as it goes, all the way to the final image of a life…”
Chronologically, the book ends at the year in which Ernaux has finally decided on a suitable form for her unique memoir. This is the form she uses, starting and ending with a series of images, with photographs marking milestones, and moving from "she” to "we” and, in the end, again a single person, a woman who is a living "palimpsest time”, of her own years and also of the fading memories of her ancestors.
A treasure of a book, a herstory that we longed to read, full of humility and strength at the same time, also sardonic, melancholy, and incisive.
The Years by Annie Ernaux; translated by Alison L. Strayer; published: 2017.
Originally published in French in 2008
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