A Frozen Woman by Annie Ernaux

Author:Annie Ernaux
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: literary fiction;women's fiction;gifts for women;fiction;gifts for her;fiction books;novels;women;women gifts;realistic fiction books;literature;books fiction;romance;family;marriage;love;relationships;friendship;chick lit;england;drama;literary;grief;french;divorce;infidelity;sisters;art;realistic fiction;motherhood;coming of age;adoption;mystery;short stories;modern;feminism;death;families;psychology;rome;aging;historical;mothers and daughters;relationship;book club books;translation
Publisher: Seven Stories Press
Published: 2020-04-17T11:46:22+00:00

I had believed in the lycée, as a land of liberty, equality, fraternity. Now, here in class, the twenty-six girls in pink smocks seem absolutely foreign to me, more strange than all the boys I’ve ever met in my small town. Some of my fellow students still seem like children, without any affectations or sense of style, but when they take off their smocks they slip on well-cut jackets of butter-soft suede. Other girls wear makeup and short skirts that are fashionably but discreetly full. There are no bubbleheads or clowns, as there had been back in the convent school. In this senior class, the popular type is the wholesome girl, straightforward, in a navy blue blazer. The twenty-six of them are right out of the Brigitte series, from the nicer neighborhoods of Rouen, Bihorel, Mont-Saint-Aignan, but I don’t recognize them immediately. I find their casual attitude toward everything chilling; they carp at the teacher and make fun of a scholarship student from the countryside around Dieppe who still uses words in the Norman dialect. They talk seriously about sexuality, about Freud, with no laughter or obscenities; they seem oblivious to boys and any interest in sleeping with them. I feel dirty and cheap next to them. And their self-confidence astonishes me, they never seem to work—just imagine, I got fifteen out of twenty and I didn’t even crack a book until ten last night—it’s so cool, being brilliant without even trying, I can’t get over it, because where I come from, everyone looks down on slackers. And they’ve all got unheard­of ambitions: psychiatrist, poli sci, hypokhâgne. Faced with their self-assertiveness, their confidence, I take my doubts and my habit of working as little as possible for signs of a real inferiority. We’re all the same sex in our final year at the lycée Jeanne­d’ Arc, but not of the same social background. My sisters, those girls? What a strange idea. They’re a much greater obstacle to my future than the boys are. Everything my mother ever said to encourage me—you can be whatever you want to be—is collapsing; the young ladies from Bihorel are stifling my ambition. When I go home on Saturday, I seem to notice fewer people in the store; the supermarket is stealing away our customers, so how can I be greedy, when I feel responsible for the canned goods gathering dust on the shelves? Professor, librarian, such a long and difficult path. Schoolteacher, I’d start earning money right away. The girls in my class talk about going to university as though they’d already reserved their places. Not me. Hypokhâgne, what is that, exactly? She looks at me pityingly, Annick, well if you don’t even know that . . . I can see some girls are more free than others. Not one friend.

I walk along the boulevard de l’Yser to the hostel, 113 francs per month, meals included, three times less than what a suede jacket costs. The lycée students’ table, the technical college table, hairdressing apprentices’ table.

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