Shame by Annie Ernaux

Author:Annie Ernaux
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: man booker prize;man booker;french literature;relationship;family life;mother daughter;mental health;small town;confession;metoo;violence;trauma;teenage;divorce;family;feminist;literary fiction;women's fiction;gifts for women;gifts for her;fiction;novels;fiction books;women;women gifts;literature;realistic fiction books;books fiction;marriage;relationships;love;aging;friendship;womens fiction;grief;literary;relationship books;contemporary women's fiction;infidelity;motherhood;death
Publisher: Seven Stories Press
Published: 2020-04-17T16:54:22+00:00

The question of whether or not I liked Mademoiselle L is irrelevant. She was the most educated person I knew. She was a different class of woman, quite unlike my aunts or my mother’s customers. She was the living embodiment of authority and could guarantee the excellence of my scholastic being every time I reeled off a poem or handed in a faultless dictation. I always measure myself against her, rather than my classmates: I must know everything she knows by the end of the year. (This was linked to the long­standing belief that teachers knew nothing more than what they taught us; hence the profound respect and fear felt for those who taught “senior classes” and the contempt felt for those whose classes we had left behind and therefore whom we had surpassed.) When she silences me to give the others a chance to reply or when she tells me to explain the grammatical structure of a sentence, I become her ally. In my mind, her determination to hunt down the slightest of my academic failings is a means of elevating me into her own world of perfection. One day she criticized the way I wrote the letter “m,” the first down stroke slightly curved on the inside, like an elephant’s trunk, snickering, “it looks dirty.” I said nothing but blushed. I knew what she meant and she knew that I knew: “You do your ‘ms’ like a man’s penis.”

That summer I sent her a postcard from Lourdes.

(As I describe my educational background in 1952, the Communion photograph is gradually becoming more familiar. The solemn face, the unblinking gaze, the faint smile, proud rather than wistful—these features are growing less blurred. The “text” brings the picture into focus, in the same way that the photograph illustrates my writing. Now I can see the good little girl who goes to private school, enjoying the power and ideology of a world symbolizing truth, progress and perfection, a world which, in her eyes, she would never fail.)

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