The Young Man by Ernaux Annie

Author:Ernaux, Annie [Ernaux, Annie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Contemporary, Biography, feminism, biography; feminism; biographies; autobiographies; books for women; women in history; biographies of famous people; inspirational books for women; memoirs; memoir; women; autobiography; autobiography books; literary gifts; literature; historical biographies; biographies and memoirs; literary biographies; biographies of women; about women; memoir books; french; classic; marriage; love; essays; feminist; literary fiction; england; friendship; relationships; gender; chick lit; mental health; self help; divorce; writing; fashion
ISBN: 9781644213209
Amazon: 1644213206
Goodreads: 125078616
Publisher: Seven Stories Press
Published: 2022-05-05T07:00:00+00:00

Our relationship could have been considered from the perspective of mutual gain. He gave me pleasure and made me relive things I would never have imagined experiencing again. That I treated him to trips and saved him from looking for a job that would have made him less available to me seemed a fair arrangement, a good deal, especially since it was I who set the rules. I was in a dominant position, and I used the weapons of that dominance, whose fragility, in a romantic relationship, I nonetheless recognized.

I allowed myself to snap at him—I don’t know if my harsh retorts had to do with his economic dependence or his youth. “Stop busting my balls!”—a vulgar injunction he was offended by and which I’d never used with anyone before.

I liked to think of myself as the one who could change his life.

In more than one domain—literature, theater, bourgeois customs—I was his initiator, but the things I experienced because of him were also initiatory. My main reason for wanting our story to continue was that, in a sense, it was already over and I was a fictional character within it.

I was aware that this entailed a kind of cruelty towards this younger man who was doing things for the first time. Invariably, when he spoke of his plans for a future with me, I replied, “The present is enough,” never mentioning that for me the present was only a duplicate of the past. But the duplicity of which he habitually accused me in his fits of jealousy, contrary to what he imagined, did not arise from any desire I may have felt for other men, nor even from memories of past lovers, which he was also convinced I harbored. It was an inherent part of his presence in my life, which he had transformed into a strange and never-ending palimpsest.

When he was at my place, he put on the hooded dressing gown that had enveloped other men. When he wore it, I never saw any of the others in particular. Gazing at the light gray terry cloth, I felt only the sweetness of my own continuity and the consistency of my desire.

Sometimes we talked about the day when he would be married and the father of a child. This future we invoked, looking deep into each other’s eyes, holding each other tightly, on the verge of tears, was not at all sad. That we experienced it as something past made the present moment all the more intense and poignant. We communed in our imaginations over our mutual loss with acute pleasure.

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