The Weight and Worthlessness of Women’s Words
Has society been “negging” women all this time?
I’d never heard of French writer Annie Ernaux until I read about her winning the Nobel Prize for literature in 2022. Several details struck me when reading this story about her in the New York Times. But the one that stood out the most was that she kept writing her first book a secret from her husband.
That effort led to her 1974 debut, “Cleaned Out,” a deeply autobiographical novel that she worked on in secret from her husband, who belittled her writing. After she sold the book to a prestigious publishing house, Gallimard, her husband was incensed that she had concealed the project, pretending that she was working on her Ph.D. thesis. The marriage unraveled shortly after the publication of her third book, “A Frozen Woman,” in 1981, which explored her discomfort with marriage and motherhood. After their divorce, Ernaux never remarried, and said she preferred the freedom of living alone.
Here’s a woman who is intelligent and accomplished enough to be earning a PhD, and still her husband belittles her writing? Why would he do that?
One clue came elsewhere in that New York Times story, which said Ernaux’s writing focuses on personal details of domestic life, using them to comment on society at large.
