Member Reviews
Roman C, Reviewer
These three pieces of autofiction are very clearly in dialogue with [author:Annie Ernaux|56176] as acknowledged by the author at the start of Seventeen/[book:Dix-sept ans|24338579].
The first piece on having an abortion and the long emotional aftermath also, though, highlights the differences from Ernaux's experience: the narrator here is living in Paris in the 1980s, is the privileged daughter of left-wing doctors, and doesn't experience that shame which is such a driver from Ernaux's working-class background to her writing. Nevertheless, the event is no less foundational here, reverberating as an echoing sense of absence and loss through a life.
The second piece, Friendship in this English translation, rather than the more clarifying [book:Deux petites bourgeoises|57946599] in the original feels particularly Gallic as it traces the lives of two bourgeois women in a tradition that certainly encompasses, if it doesn't spring from, [book:Madame Bovary|60694].
The third piece, Swimming: A Love Story/[book:La tendresse du crawl|44291454], is perhaps the most sophisticated as the older narrator comes to terms with her expectations and experiences of love.
What holds all three pieces together is an acute engagement with what it means to live inside a female body: teenage confidence and unassailability are punctured by the biology of pregnancy; bourgeois comfort cannot hold back the ravages of life or cancer; and, finally, a form of freedom and self-love come, unexpectedly, from swimming: 'I was completely inhabiting my body, it was an entirely unfamiliar freedom, bodily freedom, rapture, a sensuality that I alone was responsible for'.
This may not be as literally and intellectually sophisticated as Ernaux's work or as expansive as Deborah Levy's 'living autobiography' books, but this adds a Parisian slant to our growing shelf of what it means to live bodily as a woman at the turn of the twentieth/twenty first centuries.
