#RivetingReviews: Mandy Wight reviews THE LIFE, OLD AGE AND DEATH OF A WORKING-CLASS WOMAN by Didier Eribon, translated by Michael Lucey
Didier Eribon is probably best known to Anglophone readers for his memoir Return to Reims. There, he writes about his re-engagement with his family after decades of estrangement, during which he moved to Paris, became a university teacher and public intellectual and came out as a gay man. This book is in some ways the next instalment, in that it deals with the decline and death of his mother in a nursing home outside Reims. Like Return to Reims, the book is a highly personal account, but contains references to the literature and theory through which the writer seeks to make sense of the experience – the ageing process, the nursing home, his mother’s life, the meaning of family.
A combination of declining mobility, frequent falls and some cognitive loss meant that Didier’s mother could no longer live independently. After considering other options, and in the face of fierce opposition from her, the family decided there was no choice but for her to go into the local, publicly funded nursing home. The finality of this move, and his mother’s overwhelming sadness at the loss of home and autonomy, is only too clear to Didier on the day he helps her move in. She makes an effort to get on at first, signing up for singing and gymnastics, but these attempts to make some sort of life there are short-lived. She’s desperately lonely, refusing to engage with the other residents, and leaves long, anguished messages on Didier’s answering machine. Her sense of isolation only intensifies when she becomes bed-bound, and, shockingly, is only helped out of bed once a week to shower and sit in a chair, because it takes ‘two aides, two men to support her’ and the home simply doesn’t have the staff.
Didier sees her now as imprisoned, institutionalised in a system he describes as ‘totalitarian’, citing Erving Goffman. There is a less theoretical warning from a doctor about the syndrome de glissement: a rapid decline caused by a physical or psychological shock, a surgical operation, an accident or death – or admission to a nursing home, which to the resident feels like abandonment. This might explain the mother’s swift deterioration, and eventual death, in a matter of weeks. Afterwards, Didier suggests another trigger to add to the list of events provoking the glissement was unhappiness in love. His mother had at the age of eighty started an affair with a man called André, which had made her happier than she ever was in fifty years of marriage. But eventually André broke up with her, which only added to the elderly woman’s feelings of abandonment.
The second half of the book focuses more on Didier’s feelings after his mother’s death, together with reflections on her life and their relationship in recent years. He finds himself thinking he is no longer a son, though he concedes that he was never much good in that role – it ‘didn’t really fit with who I was’. His identity was more bound up with his intellectual life, and his friends around those interests, who became a kind of ‘chosen’ family.
He reflects on his irritation at the TV, constantly on in the background during his visits to his elderly mother – something that drove him mad as a teenager. He loathes the cheap sensationalism peddled by TV soap operas and the reinforcement of racist stereotypes. There’s quite a section on his mother’s racism – one of the things he wanted to escape from in the past. Now, he feels ‘compassion and tenderness’ towards this old woman, and only protests ‘half-heartedly’ at her diatribes against ‘foreigners’.
TV drivel is just one irritant that resurfaces in this last phase of Didier’s relationship with his mother. He’s annoyed and wearied at the way she repeatedly brings up his funny antics as a child and teenager, though he is aware too that this is because she somehow lost track of him after that, and these memories are what she can hold on to. When he finds his copies of Camus’s L’Étranger and Sartre’s Les Mots tucked up amongst his mother’s romantic novels, it seems to illustrate the gulf between them, but also what he owes her. For he is now quite clear that it was his mother’s – and his father’s – hard graft in the harsh conditions on the factory floor that enabled him to pursue his education, get away to Paris and become the person he is today.
In the final section, Didier Eribon discusses Simone de Beauvoir’s book Old Age and Norbert Elias’s The Book of the Dying. He’s curious about why few people have even heard of de Beauvoir’s book, let alone read it, when The Second Sex is an international classic. Could it be that ageing is a subject we just don’t want to read about? Yet, his mother’s miserable last weeks in the nursing home suggest that caring for the elderly is a topic that urgently demands our attention – after all, it will come to most of us soon enough. This thoughtful and honest account is an excellent starting place for a deeper engagement with this theme.
Reviewed by Mandy Wight
THE LIFE, OLD AGE AND DEATH OF A WORKING-CLASS WOMAN
by Didier Eribon
Translated by Michael Lucey
Published by Allen Lane (2025)
September 2025 #RivetingReviews titles are available to buy from bookshop.org.
Mandy Wight has published several translations from German on the No-Mans-Land Website, including excerpts from novels by Ursula Krechel, Nina Jäckle, Ulrike Edschmid, Natascha Wodin and Monika Helfer. In 2018 she was awarded the Goethe-Institut Award for New Translation for her translation of an extract from Juli Zeh’s novel Unterleuten. She writes on books in English and in translation at her blog Peakreads.
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