Mallory Jones
I read Annie Ernaux for the first time in my twenties. I was in London by then, a long way from Leeds, and I had decided that the past was a place I had been and left.
We thought it was sorted. That is the thing I keep coming back to. We had the pill and the Act and a woman had been prime minister, which we had been encouraged to count as progress. The general feeling among women my age was that the heavy lifting had been done by somebody else, some time ago, and that we had arrived in time for the easy part.
So I read her the way you read history. Terrible thing. Happened to a woman in France. Over now.
If you have not read her: Annie Ernaux is French, born in 1940, and in 2022 she was given the Nobel Prize in Literature for half a century of writing about her own life. Her parents. Her class. Her body. Her abortion, which was illegal when she had it. Happening is about a hundred pages long. It will take you an evening, and you will not sleep much afterwards.
* * *
I went back to it this year, and not for craft, and not for research.
Here is what happened first.
Thirty-three years after a boy stood on a cycle path and told me he did not love me, he came back. Unasked, from the other side of the world, into a life he knew nothing whatsoever about. And he rewrote the whole of it in a single sentence.
Where I was standing when it arrived matters, because it is the part that gets lost every single time.
I was not looking.
I had told him so, in writing, days beforehand, in those words: this is not a romantic fishing expedition. I had told him I believed what he said to me in 1992. I had made my peace with it decades earlier and I had said so to him, more than once.
That peace was not what it sounds like. People hear it as recovery. It was nothing of the kind.
I had not got over it. I had survived it.
At eighteen there was a choice, and I remember making it. Let it in and break, or pack it away and carry on. I packed it away and carried on, and I did it beautifully, for three decades, and anybody who knew me would have told you I was fine.
Nothing in there got smaller. It waited, in the exact shape and size it went in.
And the whole arrangement rested on one thing being true: that he had not loved me. He had told me so to my face, in daylight, and I had believed him, and believing him was the only thing that let me stand up. It was not a wound I was nursing. It was the foundation.
It was also a lie, and he was the only one who knew.
He knew the rest of it too. I had explained the whole arrangement to him, in full, that same week.
And then he did it anyway.
He sent the one thing I had not asked for, could not use, and had built my entire life around not needing. He interrupted me. That is the plainest available word for it.
Then he asked for the conversation, and he chose the room it would happen in.
And when I answered — not with love, which may well be what he was braced for, but with what had actually happened to me — he went quiet.
Then he came back, and for eighteen months he wrote to me about everything else. His sleep. His work. His running. Records, gardening, the dogs, a politician he could not stand. Thousands and thousands of words, warm and funny and generous and precise, arriving at four in the morning his time.
He called it a friendship.
Every one of them screaming silence.
In August I sent him an email telling him something I had never told anybody in thirty-three years. It concerned him directly. He was the only other person it concerned at all. I wrote it plainly, with no accusation in it and no demand for any particular response.
Four days later he replied, on a different platform, about his inbox.
I will not pretend I handled that well. It put me into a tailspin that lasted weeks, and the tailspin was not really about him. It was about the book. I had a book by then, and all of it suddenly looked like a woman going on about herself.
Am I allowed to write this.
Is anybody actually interested.
Am I just a woman who could not get over a boy.
Eighteen months of it, and there I sat, checking whether I was allowed to mind.
Those are three questions and they are all the same question, and every woman who has ever written about her own life has sat where I was sitting and asked it. I went back to Ernaux to find out whether I was asking too much.
* * *
What I had missed at twenty-three was the force of it.
I had read it as a document. It is not a document. It is a woman holding something absolutely still, decades after the fact, and describing it at a level of exactness that most people cannot manage about last Tuesday. She has the rooms. She has what was said and what was not said. She has the sequence.
I know that kind of recall. I have it. It is not a gift and it is not nostalgia. It is what the mind does with an event it was given no help to process at the time: it keeps the whole thing, uncatalogued, in case somebody ever asks.
Nobody ever asks.
* * *
And then I found the thing I had not expected, and it stopped me.
She wanted her body to stop doing what it was doing, and it would not.
I wanted my body to carry on doing what it was doing, and it could not.
Same helplessness. Same aloneness. Opposite direction. Two women in two different decades in two different countries, each one locked inside a body that was going the wrong way, each one left to deal with the consequences on her own.
I had expected to find a predecessor. What I found was a harmony. Not the same note — the interval.
And around both of us, the same machinery. An institution with a clear procedure for the paperwork and none at all for the person. People who were not cruel, doing ordinary jobs on ordinary days, who between them produced a girl holding something nobody had given her a word for.
* * *
Then there is the boy, and I had him wrong.
I had assumed he was absent the way 1963 made men absent — no language for it, no expectation that he would have any, no room to be in. Architectural. You can be furious about that. You cannot really be surprised by it.
He is not absent. He is right there. He is there while she is pregnant. They go on a holiday that was arranged before, with another couple, and he goes, and she goes, and the thing sits in the car with them the entire way. He will not talk about it. And afterwards — after the part that nearly killed her — he does not arrive either.
He had a mouth and a train fare and sixty years of nothing stopping him.
So the two men are not separated by six decades of social progress. They are the same man with different hardware. One had no vocabulary and used it. Mine had thirty-four years, a profession made entirely of language, and an interior life he could describe at length and in detail whenever he chose to.
And mine went first. Nobody asked him for anything.
Sixty years apart, every tool in the world handed to the second one, and the result is identical. That is not a capacity problem. That has never been a capacity problem.
* * *
Now turn it round.
Imagine I had sent the three words.
A woman of fifty-two reaches twelve thousand miles into the life of a married man she has not seen since 1992, and writes to him.
She tells him she loved him.
She tells him it was the very best of physical and emotional attraction.
She tells him that what they had is the only love she has ever been sure of.
She tells him she does not know how she feels about anybody now, and cannot remember a time when she did.
Then she goes quiet for weeks.
Then she comes back and tells him about her sleep.
Then she asks whether he has read a novel.
Tell me what that woman is called. And be honest about how quickly you got there.
She is not complicated. She is not described as someone who disappears for a while and means nothing by it. She is obsessive. She is unstable. She is a woman who cannot let go. Somebody says bunny boiler, somebody else says poor wife, and the whole thing is settled before anybody asks what she actually wanted.
Same act. Same words. Same silences, in the same order. The only variable is which of us did it.
You already have the words for a woman who keeps asking. You did not have to look them up. You could give me six of them before you finished this sentence, and so could I, and neither of us would need a dictionary.
Now give me the word for a man who will not answer.
Take your time.
That gap is not an oversight. It is the permission.
So the rates are set before anybody opens their mouth. Ask once and you are owed an answer. Ask twice and you are difficult. Write a book about it and you are whichever of those six you reached for first. The quickest way to avoid all three is the route women have been taking for several thousand years, which is to say nothing and be called dignified.
Dignity is a wonderful thing. It is also the cheapest possible settlement, and it is always offered to the person who was not paid.
* * *
And while we are here, a word about the shelf I am supposed to be writing on.
The genre is called autofiction. The term was coined in 1977 by a French novelist called Serge Doubrovsky, on the back of his own book, to describe a thing he had decided to do: write his own life as a novel, with his own name on the narrator. He has been called bold for it, and candid, and brave, and he is generally credited with inventing the form.
Sylvia Plath published The Bell Jar in 1963. Fourteen years earlier. Her own breakdown, her own hospital, her own name swapped for one letter.
Annie Ernaux published her first book in 1974. Three years earlier. It was a fictionalised account of her own illegal abortion.
So two women had already done the thing, one of them twice, before anybody thought to name it. Then a man named it, and the name is his, and the genre is his, and the bravery is his.
Plath was confessional. Ernaux was personal, and French, and writing about her body again. He was an innovator.
Go and look at the photographs of the three of them. Then decide which of those faces the twentieth century was ever going to call the inventor of anything.
They were just women, writing about what had happened to them.
Now they are on his shelf.
* * *
So. The question I actually went looking for an answer to.
The charge against this kind of writing never changes, and it is never about the writing. Too personal. Too small. A woman going on about her own body. Ernaux has had it in French for fifty years. The Nobel did not stop it.
The defence has never been scale. It is precision.
A thing described exactly enough stops being one woman's complaint and becomes a record. That is what she does. It is what I am trying to do. It is why my book is written in the register I use at work, and that register is the only reason I can look at the subject at all.
So, no. I was not asking too much.
I have written a book about a girl of seventeen who lost a pregnancy that nearly killed her, in a hospital that never once said the word baby, and who was then left by a boy who would not say why.
And about what it does to a woman to be handed the truth thirty-three years late, by the one person who could have given it to her at any point in between, and then left holding it on her own.
Because it is the truth that opens the trauma. Not the lie. The lie was survivable — I had thirty-three years of proof. It is the correction that takes the lid off.
And the thing he will not be present for is the thing he caused by speaking.
He opened the box. He started the conversation. He chose the room. And then he would not stand in it with what came out.
At nineteen I could forgive him that. He was a boy with no words for any of it, from a family that did not deal in them, and I have spent a whole book being fair to him on precisely those grounds.
At fifty-five it is significantly harder to find the excuse. I have looked. Looking is the thing I am best at. There is not one that holds.
And at fifty-two, after a year and a half on the floor of my own kitchen, I have finally worked out the part that took me longest.
I do not have to keep finding it for him.
Ernaux's book gave me the thing I had gone there hoping somebody else had already proved.
It happened. It mattered. And it is allowed on the page.