When Didier Eribon’s mother was eighty-seven, he and his estranged brothers placed her in a nursing home in Fismes, near Reims, northeast of Paris. Within a few weeks she had become bedridden and stopped talking, eating and drinking. Less than two months after her admission she was dead.
According to the institution’s clinicians, such a rapid decline was not unusual. Some French geriatricians describe it as syndrome de glissement. Literally “sliding syndrome,” the term was developed to characterise someone who appears to simply lose the will to live. The clinical literature notes that it occurs in the wake of a profound physical or psychological shock linked to an illness, a surgical operation, an accident, a death… or admission to a nursing home “when experienced as an abandonment.” Eribon, however, believes there was another factor at work in his mother’s decline.
A few years before, she had found a new lease of life when she took a lover — André, a married man from a nearby village. She ignored the disapproval of Eribon’s brothers (who thought the relationship odd and unseemly) and survived various hospitalisations and numerous surgeries in her eighties because he came to see her, and she loved him. But as her cognitive abilities deteriorated she grew increasingly belligerent and delusional, and her behaviour became strange and erratic. It was too much for André to handle.
Eribon believes his mother never recovered from the end of the affair. Why, he wonders, is “unhappiness in love” not listed as one of the catalysts for the development of syndrome de glissement in the elderly? Is it because such subjects are taboo? His new book, The Life, Old Age and Death of a Working-Class Woman, is driven by the idea that “the afflictions of an ‘unseemly old lady,’ deeply in love and deathly unhappy, should be accorded their rightful place.”
A French sociologist and biographer of Foucault, Eribon is best known outside academic circles for his acclaimed memoir Returning to Reims (first published in French in 2009). Sparked by the death of his father, this is an account of his impoverished, working-class background and his escape, aged twenty, to Paris, where he cut ties with his family and reinvented himself as an openly gay bourgeois intellectual — and shut himself in “a class closet.” (“What was difficult was not being gay but being working class,” he told the Guardian in 2018.) Drawing on the work of critical theorists and philosophers, Returning to Reims managed to be at once a vivid memoir and a compelling meditation on sexuality, family, class and shame.
Eribon continues this personal, philosophical and socio-historical exploration of his family and the French working class in this latest book. He sets out to offer us a portrait of his mother, with whom he reconnected when his father died, as well as a generation of “white women of extreme old age from the working class of Northeastern France.”
Eribon feels he “must now speak of her so that she may live again.” But he is almost immediately stumped: “What did I know of my mother’s life?” Much less, he decides, than she knew of his. This is not unusual. As he reflects, our parents (particularly our mothers) are typically the archivists and historians of our lives, especially our youth. They photograph us, keep our health and educational records, save our early drawings and jottings, are the genealogical guide to kinship networks and tell stories of our childhood and adolescence that (for good and ill) enable us to imagine our past.
His mother’s “litany of memories” helps Eribon give a rich account of his youthful transformation into what he calls a “class renegade.” This was a time when he was flamboyantly attempting to distinguish himself from his working-class milieu and remake himself as a radical bourgeois intellectual — wearing his hair long, donning corduroys, turtlenecks and a duffle coat, poring over thick volumes of Marx, Plato, Aristotle and Kant and risking suspension at school and university for his political activism in a way that shocked and angered his parents. It’s only after her death that he wonders how his mother experienced the distance he put between them and, more generally, what it’s like for working-class parents to “live through the upward social trajectories of their children.”
While his mother was a “privileged witness” of Eribon’s youth and class transformation (a position he admits he frequently found annoying), he finds he has little to attest to her life. Like most children, he was never particularly interested in the lives of his parents: he knows little about what his mother’s life was like when they shared the same house and even less about her life before he was born. (“How little one knows, really, of one’s parents.”) As have many social historians before him, he also laments the lack of raw materials from which he might reconstruct her working-class life — the dearth of diaries, photographs, letters and other documents that make it possible for historians to individuate the lives of the middle and upper classes.
Eribon’s account of his mother’s life is thus, perhaps necessarily, sketchy. Born in 1930, she (we are never told her name) was abandoned as a child and started work as a maid at fourteen, later becoming a cleaner. She married at twenty and lived for the next fifty-five years with a violent, jealous, controlling man she did not love. After her sons were born, she worked in a factory (not least to fund the author’s education) and became a staunch member of the CGT — the union most closely affiliated with the then powerful Communist Party — in an era of dramatic industrial unrest. As she aged, she became “obsessively” racist and her politics veered from far left to far right.
In some candid, moving moments this complex figure, about whom the author has such conflicted emotions, jumps off the page. We glimpse her, for example, when Eribon recalls the mother of his youth angrily denouncing fellow workers who fail to turn up to a picket line as “a bunch of cowards!” We see her stopping for a minute to watch an interview with Simone de Beauvoir about the condition of women her teenage son is watching on TV to remark: “It’s true what she’s saying. She’s right.”
She’s also alive in Eribon’s recollections of her ageing: refusing to talk to “all those old ladies” in the nursing home; directing racist diatribes at the TV; making fun of his speech (“There’s Mr Philosopher talking again!”); and leaving long, rambling, indignant, despairing messages from her institutional bed on the answering machine of a son who didn’t manage to return to the nursing home before she died.
Eribon writes as a son reckoning with feelings of grief and guilt, but also as an academic interested in his mother as a social type. He draws on literature (Ernaux, Beckett, Coetzee) as well as theory (Foucault, Bourdieu, De Beauvoir, Elias) to explore what her life and death reveal about notions of class, gender and extreme old age. Reflecting on his mother’s despairing messages, he persuasively identifies a clear “political dimension” in her protests against the dismal, understaffed, underfunded institutions in which society houses the elderly. When she was a factory worker his mother belonged to a union and a party that gave her a political voice. But the very old, isolated in nursing homes and often physically and sometimes cognitively impaired, lack the means to collectively organise and insist on a stake in the polity. Thus, he argues, it is incumbent on “writers, artists and intellectuals to speak of and for them.”
Despite such insights, Eribon in academic mode can be tough work. Even the most committed reader is likely to struggle with some of the convoluted, ponderous prose. Take, for example, this sentence on the difficulty political theorists have discussing the elderly:
To bring up old age is to make visible everything that most theories have had to leave in the shadows in order to function, everything that cannot be or must not be taken into consideration so that a concept can occupy the place it has been given, the place that has been designed or designated for it.
Woven throughout the narrative, these philosophical and political reflections also have the effect of rendering Eribon’s portrait of his mother curiously oblique. And I kept mulling over his decision not to name her — a decision he never explains. Perhaps it signals that at some level the author recognises his mother as what G. Thomas Couser calls “a vulnerable subject.” For Couser, considering the challenges of life writing, this is a person who is unable to meaningfully consent to, critique or correct someone else’s representation of them.
As a cosmopolitan academic who has already written one memoir about his estranged working-class family, Eribon has been here before. And it’s clear that his subjects have not been entirely happy with his representation of them. In The Life, Old Age and Death of a Working-Class Woman, Eribon notes in passing that one brother was so incensed by Returning to Reims that he threatened to sue him for “family calumny” (the author reassures us that “there is no such thing, legally speaking”). Elsewhere we learn that all his brothers felt the first memoir mocked them.
His mother’s response was more ambivalent. According to Eribon, she was proud of the book but felt there was much in it that was “false” (at one point she called him “a liar”) and took his account of the family’s early poverty as “an attack on her dignity.” He imagines she might have taken his latest book as “an homage, while protesting against certain passages.”
Unlike Couser, Eribon is not interested in interrogating the ethics of life writing within families, but his latest book could be read as powerful testament to the difficulty, as well as the necessity, of speaking of and for vulnerable subjects. •
I am in debt to Gemma Nisbet for drawing my attention to G. Thomas Couser’s work.
The Life, Old Age, and Death of a Working-Class Woman
By Didier Eribon | Translated by Michael Lacey | Allen Lane | $54.99 | 256 pages
