Reading and Remembering With Annie Ernaux
Life has been so frenetic lately. Adult (gah…my youngest is nearly 18!) children coming and going, finishing school, starting their jobs. House on the market and all the hectic activity that comes with that. Work travels. Family visits. Lining up what seems like a bazillion interviews for this book I’m working on. (Yay!) All good stuff — life churning and chugging along.
But I do miss reading. And although for the last nearly five years (!!), my mind would ping *constantly* with things to post here, I can feel the pings slowing down — temporarily…
Yet reading this recent profile of the French novelist Annie Ernaux in the New York Times Sunday magazine stirred something inside of me. It was like a little poke on the shoulder saying, “Remember?” Remember how grounding it is to read about great writers, about great writing? Remember the joy — and luxury — of sitting down and immersing yourself in something more complex than television or social media or Nonogram? Remember? Remember? Remember?
I think it was the opening graf in this piece, written by Rachel Cusk, that set the tone. Here’s part of it: “It was pleasant, I had often been told, for a writer to live somewhere where reading and writing were accorded the highest respect, and it was true that — in Paris at least — these were semipublic activities: In every park and café, on the Metro and on the benches along the Seine, people were openly engaged in what for me had always been the most private and solitary of occupations. Bookstores still held their ground here among the shopfronts, and the deification of French writers living and dead was evinced everywhere in street names and statues and advertising hoardings for new novels. I listened on the radio to an astronaut reading passages aloud from Marguerite Duras from his space station to his earthbound audience below.”
I can’t get to Paris, but…I can tuck away this little piece of inspiration. (And also look to read more Annie Ernaux, who is the first Frenchwoman to win the Nobel Prize for Literature.) #RememberParis
originally published on instagram