Shame
On Annie Ernaux's 'Shame' and the eavesdrop that defined my childhood
The other day I was talking to friend and writer, Brandon Meland, and we agreed that intense books can help cut through anxiety. Emotional devastation in the name of shaking you out of your monkey mind. That’s probably not a healthy thing, nor am I advocating for such an approach, but ‘tis the season.
It’s summer. My brain’s on fire. There’s much to do, much to see, many people to hug, many concerts to attend, much art to see, many loves to love. The stacks in my office at home are teetering. The stack beside the bed is made up of half- and quarter- and three-quarter-reads. Every other day three books become available from long waits at the library. I have thoughts, ideas, and energies pulling at me like a medieval torture rack: novel, new stories, old stories. I’m doing book(ish), I’m playing Summer Dad to my nine year-old, I’m partnering and date-nighting with Rebekah, I’m cooking with friends, I’m yukking it up in backyards, I’m hosting out-of-town friends, I’m three-day vacationing, I’m dreaming of starting a band, I’m organizing the garage, I’m buying too many books, I’m swimming, I’m getting a lump removed from my head (not cancerous, phew), I’m running, I’m biking with Frankie, I’m organizing playdates, I’m trying to keep the fridge stocked, eating tacos, spooning peanut butter straight from the jar (no chaser), letting my meditation practice falter, I’m tired and wired and ruin too easy. I know what I should do but I don’t do it—Paul the Apostle knows what’s up—which is: slow down. Lie in the grass. Tend to the garden. Write thank you cards. Chill.
I’ve never been a good chiller. I guess that’s why I run marathons. But hey, a girl can dream.
It is within this context that I entered Annie Ernaux’s Shame, first published in France in 1997, and translated into English the following year. I’d wanted to write a pride-themed book to close out pride month, and many worthy titles competed for my attention—Lars Horn’s Voice of the Fish, James Hannaham’s Didn't Nobody Give a Shit What Happened to Carlotta, Andrea Lawlor’s Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl—but they were simply either too long, or I wasn’t in the right brain space to give them a full, slow consideration. Maybe summer—maybe this summer, for me—is for short, intense books.
Three or four years back, as November approached, I surveyed my yearly reading log and found a gap: books in translation. I devoted the rest of the year solely to reading translated stuff, and fell headlong into the Argentine master of literary horror, Samanta Schweblin, the quirky and elegant Japanese novelist, Sayaka Murata, and the Chilean poet/maker of wry, puzzling fictions, Alejandro Zambra, among others. It was a delight. In general, I’d say Americans are pretty bad at reading in translation, unless it’s a book club classic. I don’t have any fancy infographics to back this up. It’s just an observation, as well as a scrutiny of my own habits. We’re stressed, overworked, often underpaid, up to our necks in bills and dirty laundry and too many texts (SMS’s and otherwise) to even begin to think about The Great Beyond. It’s hard enough to read the news, let alone keep up with international littérature. (Pinkies up.)
That said, if you’re feeling a little shamed: good. 2022 Nobel prizewinner to the rescue. Go get some Annie Ernaux, stat, and maybe start (ba-dum-ts) with Shame, an 111-page memoir that examines the Self with wide eyes. “My father tried to kill my mother one Sunday in June, in the early afternoon,” the book begins. The next two-and-a-quarter pages reconstruct the scene. The year is 1952, and Ernaux is in limbo—between her working-class and sometimes violent family and the rigidities of her private, Catholic school, between her mother-pleasing devotion and a stirring sexual awakening (she’s quite anxious about getting her period), between her twelve-year-old reality and the constant attempts to look older, between needing to be on her best behavior for customers of the family-owned cafe-grocery and the desire to burst into song, between the scarred, post-war Normandy countryside and the promise of renewal. “This is the first time I am writing about what happened,” she says. “Until now, I have found it impossible to do so, even in my diary. I considered writing about it to be a forbidden act that would call for punishment.”
Though Ernaux ends Shame with a scene she calls a “sequel memory,” the book’s investigations are scattershot. The structure of her memories, “the codes and conventions of the circles” of her twelve-year-old girlhood defy chronology, though she does limit the scope of the book to 1952. Memories, photographs, objects, articles, the provincial culture of her Normandy town she calls “Y,” rules of school, rules of home, rules of religion, news items, and the leftovers of the war—she recalls them ecstatically, quizzically, scientifically, with a sleuth’s pinpointing devotion to detail and accuracy. She fact-checks her own life, consulting Paris-Normandie newspaper archives and gazing at postcards and discussing the books she read that year. (Some are stamped by the French Academy to distinguish their moral standards.) She constantly steps back. She shows us the memory, which might include a song, or lipstick, and then she shows us the cultural attitudes of said song or lipstick. She constantly doubles down on context, framing and reframing, zooming out and out, making her all the more trustworthy.
Shame is more interested in ethnographical context than emotional reconstruction. That is, she doesn’t go on as, say, Mary Karr in The Liar’s Club or Kiese Leymon in Heavy (great, classic memoirs) go on about their parents. Ernaux doesn’t mimic the novelist’s mode of deepening character, complicating her parents in order to stir up sympathy. She is interested, rather, in contextualizing the memory “empty of imagery” and “empty of formal meaning.” Ernaux’s eye is not just sober. Her approach is almost clinical, academic, even while her sentence-level writing hues closely to The Elements of Style with a level-up on concision. That is, her prose feels classic and intensely economical. Her style is cool, succinct, occasionally witty, slicing right to the bone, miraculous.
Shame, for Ernaux, is wrapped in silences. Her parents are silent with one another. (“When they did show signs of affection for each other—joking, sharing a laugh or a smile—I imagined I had gone back to the time before that day. It was a ‘bad dream.’ One hour laterI realized that these signs only meant something at the time; they offered no guarantee for the future.”) Other women silence her ever-curious gender expressions. “If it hadn’t been forbidden by my mother and condemned by the private school, I would have gone to church in stockings and high heals, with painted lips, at the age of eleven and a half.” She is lonely. “As far as I can recall, I didn’t have any friends at school.” She is the only girl in her working-class neighborhood to attend private school. She says, “there was no one, apart from my classmates, with whom to share my school secrets.” As she grows and becomes a woman, even her lovers go silent when she tells them of the violent memory. Finally, the scene itself is wrapped in silence, “an image empty of speech.”
“I expect nothing from psychoanalysis or therapy, whose rudimentary conclusions became clear to me a long time ago,” Ernaux says, which acts as a nice refutation to Richard Bernstein, whose 1998 New York Times review said this: “Reading Ms. Ernaux's story, one is tempted to ask why an event of such brief duration, replaced by an instantaneous return to normal life, produced so powerful and unshakable an impression.” Isn’t it obvious, Mr. Bernstein? Such an event is scary as hell. Children are perceptive and sensitive and malleable. They bury terror to cope, internalize it to survive. Ernaux, who has lived with this terror for so long, is up to something else entirely here. She doesn’t need a therapist, because she knows this event inside and out. She’s angling for something deeper, shaking off conventional modes of telling and plumbing psychology, casting the “traumatic”—I don’t think Ernaux would like that word nor our flippant use of it nowadays—into an archive.
Today’s trauma-drenched personal writing often veers into the gratuitous, self-indulgent, and because it revels in recounting emotional moments and scenes, I often wind up walking away a little empty, and ironically, as if the author has only just gushed on the first day of therapy. Ernaux, however, seems to say: here’s my trauma, and here’s my room, and here’s my town, and here’s my country, and here’s the great, wider, world, adorned with a litany of norms and cultural quirks and religious suffocations, all in clear and painstaking detail. Facts and scientific study of self don’t belie her story emotional power; they verify it all the more. To shroud your deepest wounds in all the facts you can muster feels like the very opposite of indulgence. It feels, in my mind, like rigorous courage.
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When I was eight, I woke early one Saturday morning to sneak some TV before my parents and sister took over. Only, I wasn’t the only one up. My mom and dad were stage-whispering in the kitchen. “Some days I come home and nobody looks at me or talks to me and I just want to turn right back around and leave,” my dad said. I lurked at the corner by the cat bowls. Mom murmured something. Dad continued, but I don’t remember what he said. It was all I needed to hear: they would divorce. At my nice, private Christian school full of nice families, one friend stood apart. Lance’s family was divorced, and he was always back and forth, splitting time, lugging overnight bags into his classroom cubby. I remember asking him what it was like, taking a keen interest in the dynamics. I imagined days and weeks and years ahead. Who would I “choose”? Who would my sister choose? Who would have the fun house? And who would have the rule-stricken one? But the day never came. On and on my parents continued, wrapping our house in silences, mom sleeping on the couch for most of my life, morals deferred to schoolteachers, God a duty, a quick, rote prayer before Easter meals.
As I read Ernaux, I was reminded of the many silences and shames that can accumulate over time. The shame of saying the wrong thing, the shame of prank calls, the shame of taking the Lord’s name in vein, the shame of swearing, sexual shame, skipping-church shame, piercing-your-lip shame, the shame of not wanting to attend church, the shame of music with “parental advisory” stickers, the shame of listening to or watching the wrong thing, the shame of thinking too much, reading too much, the shame of the secular, the shame of shame. It was better to be inoffensive, meek, hidden, rather than worldly and boisterous and well-read and full of nuanced opinions. I think of this eavesdropping moment often, the moment I realized, I knew, my parents would divorce. They did almost as soon as I moved out for college. (My sister had moved out one year ahead of me, the day she turned 18.) I was always on the lookout for fracture, and I never trusted the occasional pecks on the cheek or Valentine’s cards. Ernaux gets child psychology exactly right: signs of affection “only meant something at the time; they offered no guarantee for the future.” There were no guarantees for our future as a familial unit. It was already over. It was just a shame that my parents didn’t know it yet.
There is much to say and admire about Ernaux’s Shame—entire paragraphs in parenthesis, the exactitudes of the ways of provincial people, the searing critiques of public vs private—and I feel like I’ve only scratched the surface. Mostly, I admire her approach. We all know people who wallow in self pity and can’t seem to pick themselves up after even the slightest tragedies. And I don’t fault them—living and breathing and feeling and thinking is demanding, especially within the crushing demands of capitalism. But I wish them, as I wish all of us, the same cool eye of Annie Ernaux, and the ability to shake some meaning into automatic thoughts, difficult memories, and traumatic events. The ability to look, and look, and look again.
I read this and thought of you: Joel, my best friend in tenth grade, who was just as confused as I was.
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Have you read Shame or something else that lit you up recently? Please comment below. I’d love to hear your thoughts. If you go in search of the book, please support your local independent booksellers, shop online at Bookshop, or buy directly from Seven Stories Press, a wonderful indie press based in New York. Thanks, as always, for reading.