“My mother,” writes Didier Eribon, “was unhappy her whole life.” Abandoned as a child, she started work at 14 as a house servant, later becoming a cleaning lady and then worked for decades making glassware at a factory in France’s Champagne region.
Married at 20, she shared a bed for 55 years with a violent, philandering and controlling man she did not love, ultimately bearing intimate witness to his Alzheimer’s disease and death. A decade later, in her mid-80s, her sons put this cognitively and physically enfeebled woman into a state-run nursing home, whose French name – établissement d’hébergement pour personnes âgées dépendantes – makes it sound nicer than it was.
After only two months in this institution near Reims, swollen legs preventing her leaving her bed, still less her room, her mind ailing and her sons’ answering machines filled with tearful late-night messages from a bewildered woman, she died.
Eribon contests the idea that his mother’s death was what was called “unconscious suicide”. For him it was willed. “She could herself see this diminishment and she surely knew that it was irreversible… And yet she went on repeating, ‘When I’m feeling better’ or ‘When I’m well again’.” Eribon, a sociology professor at the University of Amiens, is alert to what his peers call the “ritual drama of mutual pretence” that neither speaker nor hearer really believe.
In truth, hers was a death foretold. The admitting doctor had warned Eribon that for new arrivals there was a high risk that, uprooted and alienated, they would quickly die. The French speak of un syndrome de glissement, a slide to death prompted by utter hopelessness.
It’s not true, though, that his mother’s life was entirely unhappy. In widowed dotage, she took a lover called André. But André ended the affair because, perhaps understandably, he could not handle her evident decline. Alone again, she took respite in mad fantasy. “I don’t remember if I told you that I’m expecting a baby,” she tells Eribon one day. “I don’t think that’s possible at your age,” he replies. “That’s what I thought, but in any case I’m not going to keep it.”
Although I was often in tears reading this heartbreaking account of his mother’s decline, Eribon often writes drily, obliquely. I’m not even sure what his mother’s first name was. He comes sidelong at his grief and guilt. He quotes writers – Beckett, Ernaux, Solzhenitsyn, Coetzee – and his great philosophical mentors – Foucault, Sartre, De Beauvoir, Bourdieu – to comprehend his loss.
This method has the virtue of underlining the unbearably universal nature of one woman’s death and its meaning for those who live on. After leaving his mother at her new home, he recalls the opening lines of Beckett’s novel Molloy. “I am in in my mother’s room. It is I who live there now. I don’t know how I got there. Perhaps in an ambulance…” Eribon doesn’t draw the moral but it’s clear: we know that when our parents die, we’re next.
Deploying his own wide reading has another purpose: it honours his mother. After all, she paid for his education, doing overtime for pin money so that this internationally celebrated intellectual could do something she was never allowed to do: flourish.
“I am fully aware that it is both in opposition to her and thanks to her that I became who I am,” Eribon writes. “I have been ashamed, obviously, and for a long time now, of the selfishness and ingratitude I displayed.” It’s not obvious: others would be more shameless.
And yet this is a finely nuanced portrait, not least when he visits his ailing mother and struggles to confront her habitual racism. In her toxically lucid moments, he recognises, she expresses hateful views to wind up her liberal intellectual son. But how can an oppressed woman from a working-class background be so hateful to persecuted minorities, he asks himself. He finds the answer in Pierre Bourdieu’s law of conservation of social violence: people who experience violence reproduce it against others. Nigel Farage’s electoral success, I thought reading this, exploits this law.
Much of the book echoed for me that of another sociologist, Richard Hoggart, who, in The Uses of Literacy, described scholarship boys who went to grammar school as eternally “uprooted and anxious”, cut off from their class, guilty about their self-perceived social betrayal. Eribon is their kin, with an additional turn of the screw: as a gay boy discovering his sexuality cruising Reims parks, he became doubly removed from his heteronormative proletarian roots. His earlier memoir, Returning to Reims, was a theatrically adapted bestseller, but figures here as a source of guilt: perhaps what he wrote was class betrayal by a deracinated intellectual exploiting a world that he had, by the skin of his teeth and the toil of his mother, avoided.For all the obliquity, Eribon is wonderful when he directly expresses his anger. He rages over his mother’s treatment in that nursing home. The civilisation of western Europe, after all, is indicted by the barbarism of overrun, understaffed nursing homes. Eribon finds staff so overworked that they are unable to care effectively for residents who, for their part, feel like prisoners deprived of rights or tenderness. “It is question of abuse,” he writes. “There is a profound immorality in the whole system. That is the word that needs to be used over and over: immorality.”
While his mother lies dying in a nursing home, Eribon’s inbox fills with messages predicated on his recent search history, inviting him to invest in private care homes. “Cynical advisers who talk about this ‘market’ use the term ‘grey gold’. Each time I come across one of these images, I feel sick to my stomach.”
The great virtue of Eribon’s memoir is that it compels us to confront our fixation on youth, our sweeping of elderly people to the margins, how we treat them not as humans but as business opportunities. All of these bespeak a blind, narcissistic and callous society. He asks profound questions that are at once philosophical, deeply personal and topical: can the completely dependent speak for themselves – and if not, who can speak for them? How does our society treat the elderly? Shabbily is Eribon’s answer to the last of these.