“When I was studying, I felt different from my fellow students. I do not come from a higher social class, many of my fellow students do. One day I talked about this during a lecture. A fellow student then referred me to the work of Édouard Louis and said: ‘You should read this, this is you.’ That’s how I ended up with literature about class, including the books by Didier Eribon and Annie Ernaux.
A few years ago I decided that I wanted to write my own book about my experiences with poverty. That is ultimately Maybe you should aim a little lower become. If you want to write, you also have to read. I bought all the books by the writers I discovered. I knew that Annie Ernaux wrote about class migration, but otherwise I hardly knew her work. The first book I read by her was The shame and that was an immediate hit.
The shame opens with the sentence: ‘My father wanted to kill my mother, one Sunday in June, early in the afternoon.’ I think that’s a brilliant first sentence. She describes the trauma of her youth, but in a very everyday context, which makes you feel more about it. The main character is called Annie, just like the writer. She grows up in poverty. When she is confronted with a violent incident, she can no longer ignore the harsh reality of her existence. Throughout the story, Ernaux keeps zooming in and out: sometimes you are in the middle of her youth, other times you write along with her, years later behind the typewriter.
I first read the book four years ago. That was a revelation to me. So people like me can also write a book, I thought. The literary world always felt far away, as if literature was meant for a certain kind of people. I found recognition with Ernaux. It is also relevant to me that she is a woman; many well-known books on class migration were written by men.
Before writing my own book, I studied literary style rules. But everything I read with Ernaux seemed to break those rules. For example, the book immediately opens with the climax, while I thought that as a writer you had to work towards that. She also puts that well-known ‘show, don’t tell’ rule to her own advantage. She describes everything very explicitly. I learned from Ernaux that for a good book I do not have to adhere to the literary rules of the higher social class. She paved the way for people like me.
When I reread it, I was struck again by how sharply she writes. The book is called The shamebut only now it struck me that that word is only mentioned for the first time towards the end. Let everything she experiences come together beautifully in that feeling of shame. I now also see how well she is able to evoke a certain time and a certain environment. As a reader you do not float above the story, you are really sitting at the kitchen table with her. With her I feel that as a reader I am in good hands. Annie Ernaux is an inexhaustible source of inspiration for me.”
