The fact that this book was published in 1981, documenting Annie Ernaux’s life from her teenage years to life as a young married woman in (I think) the 60s just astounds me because it is still so ANNOYINGLY relevant.
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Her upbringing was rather unorthodox, full of women who refused to conform to gender roles, including her own mother, a loud, confident woman who ran the family grocery store while her husband looked after the café side of it as well as the cooking at home. But as Ernaux grew up and went to school, she began to realise that her family was seen as weird, her father as emasculated for what was seen as (still is seen as) women’s work at home.
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Life passes by far too quickly and suddenly Ernaux finds herself exactly where she swore she’d never be - at the heart of a family, married, pregnant and with a giant stumbling block between her and her ambition to teach. Suddenly she’s expected to both study for her teaching exams, look after the baby all day, keep the house spic and span and have her husband’s dinner ready when he comes in from work. Occasionally her husband will deign to take the rubbish out and friends and family will exclaim what an angel he is, and he expects a thank you.
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And you STILL see this today. On Facebook you’ll come across statuses from women extolling their boyfriends or husbands for cooking them dinner or cleaning the house. Do you ever see posts from the boyfriends or husbands thanking their other halves for the same thing? Because if things were the same, you’d see these posts every damn day. The sharing of domestic tasks and child-rearing is still cripplingly biased towards women.
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I did think the translation by Linda Coverdale wasn’t quite as smooth as later translations of Ernaux I’ve read, with some clunky phrases used, but overall it was another compelling autobiographical piece from an author quickly becoming one of my favourites.