Despite everything, it is clear that it is “the time of passion”. The fever whose heat leads to craving, anger and adultery. It is preferable to ignore the identification of the couple. Its disclosure is unsuccessful.
In I have not left my night(2017), Ernaux transplants maternal suffering due to Alzheimer’s. She tells the tragedy of a disease that eats away at memory, and demolishes the balance. The narrator faces a truth that alters her daily life, amid the prediction of failure: divorce. And other aspects such as menstruation, menopause, the loss of reason, the vicissitudes of adulthood. She assumes as her own “the residue of a pain”. It’s the eighties. Sunday visits to the sanatorium. Guilt impression. She prevents emotions from superimposing in the writing that she bustles automated, and that she problematizes. From her tear the transparency of old age decants. And she writes down the stark horror of it. It is the fight for survival. In the corridors of the hospice, loquacious old women and old automatons cling to life. The transformation of the mother-daughter role is inevitable. It impacts the degenerative process of the wrinkled body of the mother where Ernaux observes herself between screams and shadows. She faces the wild voices of dementia. The fear and terror of death. The hidden or visible fear (depending on the courage) to face the past of consanguineous roots or to assume the definitive absence of the loved one.
This is connected to his other novel A woman (1988); whose gravitating piece is, of course, the mother (who “lost her mind”). The asylum. the mass. The candles. Flowers. The burial. The duel. Ernaux unleashes his suffering in this project that bifurcates between literature and reality. Who was his mom? A woman attached to religion. Of strong temperament. Graceful. capricious. bashful. Worker. Administrator of the coffee-shop or commercial premises. Stubborn because dignity is a home beacon. Postwar images and their effects. Of mental loss. Of the ties and discord between mother and daughter. Ernaux notes her birth in the forties, after the sudden death of a sister whom she did not manage to meet. She pretends to narrate neutrally, looking in the rearview mirror. She weaves life and death together, convinced that writing is also “a way of giving.” (EITHER)