The Life, Old Age, and Death of a Working-Class Woman

A meditation on the social political and philosophical questions of ageing 
 
A few years ago, Didier Eribon’s mother began to lose her physical and cognitive autonomy. After several months of resistance, Eribon and his brothers were compelled to place her in a nursing home. A few short weeks later, his mother passed away. 
 
In The Life, Old Age, and Death of a Working-Class Woman, Eribon continues the historical, political and personal reflection he began with Returning to Reims, this time turning his attention to the end of life. Tracing his mother’s rapid decline, and drawing on works by Simone de Beauvoir, Norbert Elias, Annie Ernaux and Michel Foucault, among others, Eribon transmutes his rage, sadness and the shame over her death into a strikingly nuanced portrait of the woman who raised him. Here, Eribon asks: how does our society treat the elderly? What is the place of bodies that can no longer assemble, discuss freedom or protest? Can the completely dependent speak for themselves – and if not, who can speak for them? 
 
An honest, original and wide-ranging exploration of the relationship between ageing and class, politics and literature, this is a profound meditation on a fundamental human experience, too often overlooked.

Praise for Returning to Reims: A deeply intelligent and searching book, one that makes you re-consider the narrative of your own life and reframe the story you tell yourself... Didier Eribon understands how deep the roots of inequality go

Praise for Returning to Reims: Eribon's memoir is fascinating: full of fretful honesty

Praise for Returning to Reims: Eribon offers up a magnificent example of an enlightened life liberated by theory, written in a style that deftly moves between the intimate, the social and the political

Didier Eribon is a prominent French sociologist and author on matters of social class, identity, sexuality and rebellion. He is internationally renowned for his biography of Michel Foucault and his groundbreaking memoir Returning to Reims.

A few years ago, Didier Eribon’s mother began to lose her physical and cognitive autonomy. After several months of resistance, Eribon and his brothers were compelled to place her in a nursing home. A few short weeks later, his mother passed away. 
 
In The Life, Old Age, and Death of a Working-Class Woman, Eribon continues the historical, political and personal reflection he began with Returning to Reims, this time turning his attention to the end of life. Tracing his mother’s rapid decline, and drawing on works by Simone de Beauvoir, Norbert Elias, Annie Ernaux and Michel Foucault, among others, Eribon transmutes his rage, sadness and the shame over her death into a strikingly nuanced portrait of the woman who raised him. Here, Eribon asks: how does our society treat the elderly? What is the place of bodies that can no longer assemble, discuss freedom or protest? Can the completely dependent speak for themselves – and if not, who can speak for them? 
 
An honest, original and wide-ranging exploration of the relationship between ageing and class, politics and literature, this is a profound meditation on a fundamental human experience, too often overlooked.

Didier Eribon

Michael Lucey

"There was a question that had come to trouble me a bit earlier, once I had taken the first steps on this return journey to Reims... 
 
Why, when I have had such an intense experience of forms of shame related to class, shame in relation to the milieu in which I grew up, why, when once I had arrived in Paris and started meeting people from such different class backgrounds, I would often find myself lying about my class origins... why had it never occurred to me to take up this problem in a book?" 
 
Returning to Reims is a breathtaking account of one man's return to the town where he grew up after an absence of thirty years. It is a frank, fearlessly personal story of family, memory, identity and time lost. But it is also a sociologist's view of what it means to grow up working class and then leave that class; of inequality and shifting political allegiances in an increasingly divided nation. A phenomenon in France and a huge bestseller in Germany, Didier Eribon has written the defining memoir of our times.

Didier Eribon

Returning to Reims

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