Annie Ernaux, Melissa Febos, thinking through form
It’s been a long time. Hi.
A new writer friend and I sat in Wash Park in Denver a couple of weeks ago talking about form (form as in the shape of a poem or piece of prose but also the bends of bodies and the balling of dough). I said something out loud that I’ve been keeping to myself, which is that often I write things I might not like to read. At least, this is true of early drafts. (To be fair, occasionally fifth drafts too.) It’s because, in most cases, my forms are fleshed on the page long before I’ve filled them out with enough words for the content to be translatable to anyone else. Sometimes I read published experimental work that feels just like this—like its engine runs on the tension between the piece and the reader muscling to understand it.
And I’ve been—I was, often, in my MFA program—so eager on my own forms and so sure of their rightness (but often less sure of how to clarify them outside of my head) that I was constantly saying without saying, “Reader, power this piece for me.” “Reader, work harder for me.” And my generous friends and peers spun their bicycle pedals as fast as they could, sometimes still coming up far from where my narrators stood still. I called that co-creation, which is a thing I believe very strongly in. But of course it wasn’t co-creation. Not yet.
In the past weeks, I’ve been reading everything by Annie Ernaux I can find in English. Many of her books are, of course, easily accessible in beautiful Seven Stories Press editions. They’re short. Simple Passion is 80 pages; Shame is 112. Happening, my favorite besides The Years, settles in at 96. I’ve read ten or eleven and have three or four on the little book table by the door of my new home in Denver and a couple on order at the library. I’ve been considering form and what Ernaux invites me to build alongside her as a reader. Other than The Years, which exists in a melded content-genre of its own, the books seem to fit into one of two categories: either they focus in closely on one person or intimate event or they study the world around the narrator/speaker without interiorly glancing hardly at all. In the former group, this is the abortion book and this the affair book (fiction version) and this the affair book (memoir version) and this the mother in decline. In the latter, here is a collection of observations from 1985 to 1992 and here is a collection of the same from 1993 to 1999 and so on.
When I consider her body of work as a whole, I’d say she’s created a large form—a physicality—that cordons off exterior and interior life into separate spaces within it, perhaps in the way memory does. Certainly in the way my memory does. When I take myself to a moment of intensity in my past, my memory conjures the feeling of grass under my hands, a car horn, sweat. Not global or even local circumstances, though those framings certainly affect sensory perception itself and enter a scene soon after the immediacy of sensory response abates and makes room.
Ernaux’s interior texts accomplish depth, glaring into the experience of seeking an underground abortion, for instance, while her exteriors force a reader to mine the concept of breadth itself, inquiring about how much piling of vignettes can create understanding. How much micro and how much macro observation is necessary. She reports again on a man in the RER station, a woman on the train, a child. On Bosnia and Chechnya and AIDS. Almost entirely, she leaves out the woman doing the observing and making the notations in her journal.
Both varieties of book—the internal and the external—can be discomfiting to read. Working through three different Ernaux texts on an affair, I found myself cringing at the absolute rock slide of obsession that overtakes their narrators. Or, more particularly, at Ernaux’s laying such unflattering obsession with a man bare. (And then, of course, I cringed at myself— Is my reaction just misogyny? That question that comes up whenever I find excessive feeling abhorrent. The answer most always is yes.)
I read something recently along the lines of: We find most grating the traits in others that echo aspects of ourselves we’re uncomfortable with; annoyance is an excellent litmus test for self-loathing. I’m certain this phrasing is nowhere near the real quote, but it’s the way the sentiment landed in me. It came either from Ling Ma in Bliss Montage or from Melissa Febos in Bodywork or Girlhood, all of which I read or reread this week (and in none of which can I find this reference now, but count this as an attempt at credit).
As it happens (as my reading communicates to me): I, too, have been overcome by feelings, Annie Ernaux. I, too, have been embarrassing!
Her speakers, though, communicate their own unhinging from decorum shamelessly; maybe even it is this unselfconsciousness that raises my hackles more than the obsession itself—the way that it aligns with my worst urges to declare my hear to the world. And her diaristic confessions are made all the more intense by her division of interior and exterior, such that, the whole of Possession, for instance, refuses to turn outward. It’s a text that lives inside. Claustrophobic, wet with loud sobs and obsessive hypothesizing about what her man is doing with another woman, inconsolable.
It’s uncanny to put down an interior Ernaux only to pick up an outward-looking one, which feels more like a slideshow in a lecture hall than a book. I opened and closed Exteriors (precise but distant journal-entry-style observations of the outside world over seven years) over and over again. At only 96 pages, it took me days and days to get through. I kept stashing it in strange places around the house, sort of hoping not to find it again. The feeling was not quite boredom; it was more that reading on made no difference—I was not coming to greater understanding. The vignettes were sometimes so mundane and repetitive that I felt only like I, too, was taking the train each day, and not that I was having any revelations while doing so. Things Seen, published a handful of years later, continued the project of Exteriors, but (for me) more successfully because it engaged more news and world events to shape the smaller-scale observations—taking the “exterior” idea to include a greater distance from the self and a larger number of others.
Everything Ernaux seems to be a question of scale, ratio, proximity.
Of course, my claims of her oeuvre’s divided form are shorthand—there is no pristine line between the inside and the outside of experience. Generally, she separates the two (but as a person breaking a piece of bread by hand, not as a surgeon might). Within the shape of each individual book, she worries smaller-scale ridges, inviting once or twice the “I” to enter her exterior texts and the failures of diplomats and politicians to weigh on the sensory world of her deep memory.
A couple of her works overtly and almost equally draw on both worlds, butting up against her own division. Shame centers a childhood memory that echoes into adulthood—Ernaux’s father trying to kill her mother—but the author can’t help but to study social class throughout, unable to do her work of understanding the memory’s impact without grounding it in its external circumstances. Ernaux’s family life, then, is both interior and exterior, and calling up the memory of one event from a distance forces her to call up, too, slides of images from outside of her home.
For a while, I didn’t know where to fit Shame in my understanding of Ernaux’s texts. Now, though, I’m conceptualizing it (alongside The Years, of course, which I’ve said little of because it’s so well-known but which I love dearly) as the key to her overarching form. Both books contain each of her tools, and each demonstrates within just one text how a reader might use them across the multitude of other books to place her work into useful conversation with itself.
All together, the texts leave gaps and space for misunderstanding or misapplication of contextualizing information to fraught emotional truths. Their piecemeal form allows a reader to experience in reading them something quite similar to living in a body with memory. Stories that connect in some places and not in others. Justifications and forgivenesses and grief. Missed connections.
In 2015, in a fiction workshop, writer and professor Jeff Solomon suggested to me that all writers’ style is either a clear glass or a handmade ceramic mug. The content of our work is the liquid that fills each. With the first, you can see straight through the glass to the drink all the way up until you take it in. You know the content’s color and viscosity because you’ve had the chance to study it without any interruption. Likely, you can tell exactly what it is. With the second, you experience the drink only through the complex texture and color and temperature of its vessel. Without ever seeing it, you sip, and it becomes part of you.
Jeff gave the analogy as a comfort; I was frustrated with my own inability to mimic the crystalline clarity in some of what we read. “You’re the mug.” Obviously. It changed writing for me, and gave me space, finally, to appreciate the intricacies of both manners.
And the advice has become even more helpful as I’ve swapped out the word “style” with the word “form.” Rereading Melissa Febos this week after taking a couple of workshops with her at the Port Townsend Writers Conference in July, I had the (non-revelatory) revelation that she, as a writer, in Solomon’s words, is the glass. To anyone who’s read Febos, this won’t be a salient observation. But it had an a-ha quality for me, as it helped pin down something about her voice that I’ve been unclear on for years. It has a teacherly quality, which long felt to me like a trick of the form—like I was missing something—like there was some textural whorl in the didactic that meant to take me to a layer in the content I couldn’t yet see. On this week’s read, though, I found the expository parts of the voice to be straightforwardly compassionate. Humbly mentor-like and clear. No tricks.
Ernaux, though…
My first Ernaux was I Remain in Darkness a couple of years ago. And it was a mistake to read it alone because I mistook her, too, to be a writer in glass. And she isn’t! It’s only that it took a piling of the books together for me to understand the way that her organizing principles, her parceling and borders, force strange reads of her content, creating extreme contrast between in-body and outside-body thinking that bolster the capacity of both to make meaning.
I’m captivated by this: by a woman who has created a form across a whole life of work that better mimics memory and internal sorting than anything I’ve read in recent years, and all without appearing “formally experimental,” at least in a contemporary sense. The project of reading her work is granting me this summer a glimpse into the sort of co-creation between writer and reader that really interests me and an invitation to let such a process be a long game. In the same way that many of Ernaux’s books have forced me to work against my own human judgements, her form asks me to notice what about her work’s shape invigorates and puzzles me because it teases out exactly the things that I tease in my own forms.
How do we knead a shape that mimics the mind? Is a form that feels “true” in such a way not the most pristine form of nonfiction?
I think it is, and this is why I don’t bother particularly with identifying which of Ernaux’s books are novellas and which are memoirs. The form is truth—truth of how a mind moves, of patterns and sensation. Perhaps, then, I can continue to worry less about content, which is, be it memory or invention, only form’s mirror.