thenation--2020-11-19--Annie Ernaux’s Memoirs Ask a Radical Question

In 1958 , Annie is 17 years old and has barely left the small rural town in northern France where she was born , never lived with anyone but her parents , used a telephone , taken a shower , or been to a “ real party , ” has yet to “ read Beauvoir , Proust , Virginia Woolf , ” have sex or seen it depicted .
She is a girl constituted by the time ahead , by all she has still to do .
She has been hired to be a summer camp counselor , despite having @ @ @ @ @ @ @ eager to earn some money and independence before she goes to college in the fall .
She is the first in her family to continue her education—both of her parents left school at 12 to work at farms and factories—and this status ( of being the first , the exception ) makes her simultaneously proud and afraid of her future .
She has “ a bold certainty about her own intelligence ” yet “ no defined self , but ‘ selves ’ who pass from one book to another.
” Annie is at @ @ @ @ @ @ @ as teenage girlhood , ready “ to leave [ home ] , escape the watchful gaze of her mother , the school , the town , and do what she wants : read all night , dress in black like Juliette Gréco.
” And most importantly , Annie , who describes herself as “ Catholic and working class , of peasant origin , ” wants to fall in love .
This is a familiar start to a mainstay of French literature , the story of a girl ’ s sexual awakening , but @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a sexual somnambulance .
Within a couple of nights at the camp , the head instructor , H. , takes her back to her room after the welcome party .
He is older , engaged to be married , essentially her boss .
Within five minutes of their encounter , he comes on her face , having tried and failed to penetrate her .
By the next morning , a crush has descended .
She falls madly in love with him , willfully salvaging whatever scraps of romance she can .
The next @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a group of counselors , teenage couples in darkness , “ united by a twilight hankering , ” and , hearing that she ’ s easy , one boy tries to have sex with her in their sleeping bag .
She weeps in the darkness , but “ she does not think to get up and leave.
” “ The situation is neither good nor bad , ” she thinks , “ but somewhere between distress and the consolation a substitute body provides : the same male desire in a different body .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ These intimate memories , flushed with subjectivity , are written in the third person , “ she , ” a formal choice that evokes the feeling of looking back at the past , at a younger girl who no longer exists , and inhabiting that young girl in the moment , sliding away from herself , looking up at a person carelessly imposing one ’ s own narrative over hers .
Published in 2016 and translated into English this year , A Girl ’ s Story is the recollection of this summer in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ life of memoirist Annie Ernaux .
The book might easily be categorized as a glinting particle within the larger constellation of Me Too writing , especially as Ernaux was vocally supportive of the movement , which was considerably less popular in France .
In The New York Times this year , she said of the experiences in A Girl ’ s Story , “ Had it been a rape , I might have been able to talk about it earlier , but I never thought about it that way.
” It ’ s @ @ @ @ @ @ @ saying what has until recently been unsayable—not because she requires permission but because her work has always traced the internal processes of “ afterwardsness , ” a psychoanalytic term for a remembered event ’ s acquisition of new or greater meaning retroactively .
This can also be a cultural feeling , when something in the past , seemingly individual , transforms its shared profundity or political valence before all our eyes .
Written in 2013 , although coming out a few years later , A Girl ’ s Story predates Me Too as @ @ @ @ @ @ @ s body of work speaks to the simplest and possibly best thing Me Too offered women .
It is her foundational exigency : how to remember politically , in collective form .
Across the ample particularities of over 40 years and 21 books , almost all short , subject-driven memoirs , Ernaux has fundamentally destabilized and reinvented the genre in French literature .
Her subject matter is often unorthodox , bypassing stories proper for singular , stark events , as in Happening , which calmly transcribes the harrowing sequence of an illegal abortion @ @ @ @ @ @ @ lives , as in A Man ’ s Place and A Woman ’ s Story , which memorialize her father and mother , respectively .
However , it is not the content of the books that makes the work so exciting but the rigorous and expansive form of their telling .
Ernaux ’ s writing is often described , by herself and others , as keenly sociological , a category I find increasingly vague , but that might be because of the difficulties of describing a practice of literary memoir that is thoroughly @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ s experiences that takes relations of capitalist production as the framing methods of understanding them .
Ernaux has done repeatedly what many believe to be impossible in memoir writing : articulate the subterranean or starry machinations of economies , histories , and nations without ever sacrificing the acute truths of having a body in the world .
In A Girl ’ s Story , the reframing of Ernaux ’ s encounter with H. and the other boys at camp happens slowly .
Sexual attitudes and norms are revised in fits and starts @ @ @ @ @ @ @ kinds of pleasure and anguish as the years unfold .
One night in 1958 means something different in every decade that follows , up to now , when the characters read as both staunchly old-fashioned and achingly familiar .
She writes of the shame that immediately blooms that summer : “ It is a different kind of shame from that of being the daughter of shop- and café-keepers .
It is the shame of having once been proud of being an object of desire… .
the shame of being laughed at , and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ s shame.
” She describes this as “ shame of a historical variety.
” The night with H. continues to happen inside her , and so does 1958 , by extension .
But in other ways , the endless remembrance of that event makes what is fixed in experience mutable through repetition .
There is nothing more Ernaux than this : the subtle categorization of various shames , noticing the way they join together and stray apart , the way some belong to another time while being felt so fully in the present @ @ @ @ @ @ @ carry forward , and which do we leave behind ?
Shame , historical and otherwise , has always been the connective tissue of Ernaux ’ s work .
In fact , it is the title of one of her many memoirs , published in 1999 , about a brief , violent episode between her parents .
She has written so many books , each pulled into tight focus on a single aspect of her life , that together they almost become chapters in one vast epic .
I would recommend reading them en @ @ @ @ @ @ @ their own .
Stacked , the books make you feel as if you could sew them together to create a patchwork woman .
In their fragmentation , they carry with them some spectral possibility of material cohesion , an entire life in sequence .
But with even the most casual attempt to set them in order , this inclination is quickly dispelled .
There is too much intermingling , overlap , fray .
Partly this is because Ernaux is consistently amending her version of events—not correcting or contradicting herself , exactly , but @ @ @ @ @ @ @ be true .
She never fictionalizes but simply repeats herself .
Every time she tells a story , she tells it slightly differently , stretching the membranous container of memoir to hold the same life again and again , in all its ongoing detail and paradox .
The most striking examples of this are the books about her parents .
She wrote A Woman ’ s Story , published in French in 1988 and in English in 1991 , in the months after her mother ’ s death .
It describes her mother @ @ @ @ @ @ @ end to beginning to end again , a whole life coiled tightly into a slender volume .
It is a record of grief ’ s urgency , the vertiginous need to restore the absent person to objecthood again .
At first , the boundaries of such a project seem clear : a woman , a life , a book .
But A Woman ’ s Story is the partner—a wife , one might say—to Ernaux ’ s A Man ’ s Place ( 1983 , 1992 ) , which tells the story of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
The two books are almost identical in structure , but the marriage creases across its doubled telling , folding the child , who is also the author , within its seams .
Neither life is particularly remarkable , except in the unlikely odds of their transcription .
Ernaux ’ s parents were working-class Roman Catholics , born in rural Normandy , factory workers born to farmers , who saved up and purchased a small shop in a nearby town , above which the family lived and together ran a grocery and café @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to business owners , their child was able to continue school and become a teacher , a writer , an intellectual , the unimaginable descendant of her grandfather , who couldn ’ t read or write .
It is a plain story , told in plain language .
Ernaux does not silently justify the telling of it with ornate phrasing , belle lettres , throwing poetry over their lives like a net , hauling back meaning .
This stylistic choice was quite deliberate for her .
“ If I wish to tell the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , I have no right to adopt an artistic approach… .
No lyrical reminiscences , no triumphant displays of irony .
This neutral way of writing comes to me naturally .
It was the same style I used when I wrote home telling my parents the latest news.
” Nothing dramatic happens in either book , in a traditional sense , except her jump in class positions .
Conflicts remain mostly unspoken and unresolved , her parents ’ marriage remains intact , and the sorrow of their stories comes not in narrative eruptions @ @ @ @ @ @ @ poverty across adult lives .
It ’ s no different from most .
And yet at the end of A Man ’ s Place , you weep , because a person lived , and then that person died .
What ending were you expecting ?
Ernaux ’ s straightforwardness is often mistaken as purely analytical , an acquired sociological voice rather than a colloquial style rooted in her history .
Perhaps this is because of her unwavering clarity about class hierarchy , how it shapes lives , deaths , and personhood .
In @ @ @ @ @ @ @ never detaches her mother from the economic system of which she is a part .
“ When I think of my mother ’ s violent temper , outbursts of affection , and reproachful attitude , I try not to see them as facets of her personality but to relate them to her own story and social background.
” The emotional permutations of her family ’ s everyday life are steeped in “ necessity , ” as she calls it , material survival , and as Ernaux leaves home and becomes bourgeois—someone who luxuriates @ @ @ @ @ @ @ so , who hushes her young children in the train ’ s first-class carriage , who travels for pleasure , who gets divorced , who lives in a large city—the dynamic between her and her parents becomes strained by their widening difference .
Pride and shame intertwine .
Her father ’ s “ greatest satisfaction , possibly even the raison d ’ être of his existence , was the fact that [ she ] belonged to the world which had scorned him.
” She describes their family as a “ fractured love , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Ernaux ’ s materialist lens might be austere , but her writing is never cold .
It is her attention to class as the animate , abiding foundation of her parents ’ lives that produces the most searing moments of embodiment .
After her father dies , in bed at home , she recounts how the staircase of their house was too narrow for the coffin .
“ The body had to be wrapped in a plastic bag and dragged , rather than carried , to the coffin which lay downstairs in the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ an hour .
It was a laborious operation , punctuated by the men ’ s comments on the best way to proceed.
” She does not linger over this scene .
The image of the corpse thumping down a cramped staircase is heightened and brutal , but the sentence snags on “ closed for an hour.
” How to grieve , when a single hour is all the business you can afford to lose ?
The day continues , and her husband arrives “ in the evening , suntanned , embarrassed by a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ” “ He seemed more out of place then than he had ever been , ” she observes .
“ We slept in the only double bed , the one where my father had died.
” The young pair climb into the furrowed sheets , haunted and warm .
The haunting of Ernaux is also verbal , a phantom behind every sentence .
Language is where she and her parents become the most severed from one another , and she points to the scar and the shadow of her speech .
In A @ @ @ @ @ @ @ sporadic phrasings and idioms that she italicizes , a marker that almost functions as quotations , “ because these particular words and sentences define the nature and the limits of the world where my father lived.
” These include “ There were others worse off , ” “ You don ’ t want ideas when you ’ re in trade , ” “ We were happy in spite of everything , ” “ out of place , ” “ town clothes , ” “ you slut , ” “ good manners , ” @ @ @ @ @ @ @ live , ” as in “ Books and music are all right for you .
I don ’ t need them to live.
” Italics , usually for emphasis , are used here to denote a kind of collective authorship , the words that don ’ t belong , particularly , to Ernaux .
Her father ’ s parents spoke only the local dialect , but her father “ saw patois as something old and ugly , a sign of inferiority… .
Even if his French wasn ’ t perfect , at least @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , Ernaux ’ s memoir about her generation and its origins , she easily reverts to patois at home , “ the language that clung to the body , was linked to slaps in the face , the Javel water smell of work coats , baked apples all winter long , the sound of piss in the night bucket , and the parents ’ snoring.
” This double reality means that “ as a child , when [ she ] tried to express [ herself ] correctly , it was like walking down @ @ @ @ @ @ @ French and local dialect marked the difference between her father and her grandparents , so her French and that of her father diverge .
“ Because the schoolmistress corrected me , I naturally wished to correct my father and tell him that expressions like ‘ to disremember ’ and ‘ somewhen ’ simply didn ’ t exist .
He flew into a terrible rage… .
I realize now that anything to do with language was a source of resentment and distress , far more than the subject of money.
” Ironically , I @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of Ernaux ’ s life project than to disremember the somewhen .
“ What is the belief that drives her , if not that memory is a form of knowledge ?
” Ernaux asks in A Girl ’ s Story .
In A Woman ’ s Story , she describes her grandmother ’ s craft of domesticity , the way she kept everything , the skin off the milk to bake with , the ashes of the fire for laundry .
“ This knowledge—handed down from mother to daughter for many centuries—stops at @ @ @ @ @ @ @ archivist.
” The transmission of memory from one to the other , the promise that memory can be cracked open and made communal , made infectious or inherited , is the undercurrent that flows beneath the jagged , stony surface of Ernaux ’ s books .
She speaks in proxy , for her mother and father and for her past self , who is neither hers nor theirs .
The Years , which has been called her magnum opus , brims with this mutuality and spills into a new form .
In the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and in English , translated by Alison L. Strayer , in 2017 ) , Ernaux writes the story of her life using a collective “ we.
” In French it is the je collectif , nous and on , formal and intimate variations of groupness that we don ’ t have in English .
Beginning with her birth in 1940 and ending when she is a grandmother in 2006 , The Years is both a detailed cultural history of the postwar generation in France and a literary account of what it feels like @ @ @ @ @ @ @ glow of shared reality .
The opening of The Years is cinematic—a montage of details , the shivers of juxtaposition , a proclamation of doom .
“ All the images will disappear.
” Ernaux ’ s images ( a woman pissing on the edge of her town ’ s bombed ruins , the tears of the movie star Alida Valli , a newborn with limbs flailing , an ad for a dishwashing liquid ) stack and stack , an index of her memories and others ’ , rolling in and out of the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Eventually , the book congregates around the scene of a big family lunch .
This remains the tether through the next 60 years , as grandmothers , mothers , and babies lay their lives over one another like veils or blankets .
The family ’ s voices “ compose the great narrative of collective events , which we came to believe we too had witnessed.
” It is this assemblage that Ernaux is archiving , but it is not purely familial .
Like shame , it is historical , and like love , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ speak , “ from a common ground of hunger and fear , everything was told in the ‘ we ’ voice and with impersonal pronouns.
” Ernaux moves through the 20th century in this voice , a choral document .
But the working class is not a static subject .
Its shape changes more rapidly and drastically over the course of Ernaux ’ s life than anyone could have anticipated , and her identity within it becomes unclear .
She was born in Nazi-occupied France , but the book opens in her early @ @ @ @ @ @ @ regime in 1944 , and it closes in despondent anticipation of conservative Nicolas Sarkozy ’ s 2007 presidency and the impending financial crisis .
From the echoes of subsistence agriculture , Fordist factory work , and the petit bourgeois business , Ernaux becomes a Parisian intellectual , mother to young professionals in a globalized economy .
In this new paradigm , she pushes the vestiges of a very particular social demographic ( the white rural workers of midcentury northern France ) into a larger question of how people gather around the past , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ identity in the process .
In the 1940s and ’ 50s , the oral tradition of her parents and grandparents was spoken in “ a language without praise or flattery…express [ ing ] reasonable desires and expectations : clean work , an indoor workplace , enough to eat , dying in bed.
” By the mid-1960s , as rebellious twentysomethings , “ we saw the family milieu from the outside as a closed world that was no longer ours .
The ideas that possessed us were alien to illness and factory layoffs , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ moon.
” By the 1970s , the meal is shared among new parents and the trendy Parisians who have moved in next door , in search of rural authenticity .
The number of active farmers in France went from 7.4 million in 1946 to 2 million in 1975 , leading to a boom in empty farmhouses , quickly filled .
As the 1980s near and Ernaux turns 40 , “ we instinctively avoided topics that awakened the old social longings and cultural differences , and instead examined the present we shared… .
The @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the Occupation had virtually ceased.
” Where is the family meal of ’ 68 ?
She watches much of that fateful May on television .
Only a few years older at the time than the students , she was already married with a child when that revolution appeared .
In The Years , the latter half of the 20th century includes a massive reallocation of memory : the outsourcing of the archive .
As Ernaux ’ s class identity transforms , so does the texture of recollection .
During her childhood , the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ past , in which the realities of the factory , the village , and the farm were held suspended in a tight weave of gossip , anecdote , and craft .
Previously , history was “ passed body to body , over the years…a repertory of habits and gestures shaped by childhoods in the fields.
” After upheavals in technology , education , and language , by the mid-1980s , “ the time-before vanished from family tables , and fled the bodies and voices of its witnesses .
It appeared on television in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ came from nowhere .
The ‘ duty of remembrance ’ was a civic obligation , the sign of a just conscience , a new patriotism.
” By the turn of the millennium , “ the media took charge of the process of memory and forgetting .
It commemorated everything that could be commemorated , the appeal of Abbé Pierre , the deaths of [ François ] Mitterrand and Marguerite Duras , the beginnings and ends of wars , the first step on the moon , Chernobyl , September 11 .
Every day was @ @ @ @ @ @ @ reveals that it is not only the content of our memories , what it includes and what it elides , that makes up our culture but also what form that remembering takes , how the past is distributed among the collective and by whom .
The present century is crowded , the town square has gone digital , and there is nothing as claustrophobic as a future that shrinks as we step further into it .
At the end of the book , Ernaux observes that the weather is changing—our most lurid understatement @ @ @ @ @ @ @ there came “ the inability to picture our lives in ten years ’ time , or ourselves perfectly adapted to technologies yet unknown .
( Someday , would we be able to see , imprinted on a person ’ s brain , everything they had done , said , seen , and heard ? )
” With the ease of photography , “ the obscurity of previous centuries would disappear forever… .
We were resurrected ahead of time.
” The abstract deathliness of this new , constant archive converges with her approaching old @ @ @ @ @ @ @ s “ we ” loosens .
The source of its knowledge dims and surges : The speaker stands , and contexts grow over her like moss .
Ernaux writes “ the memory of collective memory in an individual memory…from inside her language , which is everyone ’ s language , ” a game of telephone with oneself and the world .
She is wed to her origins , but they are never romanticized .
If anything , the new ways of living and remembering that have developed over her lifetime allow her to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Ernaux does not hark back to a reproduction of oral histories ; she furthers the shifts of language as she documents them .
The political consequences of such a project are sustained in every work , as gender constrains and transforms , sex loops and unravels , and economies are embedded in bodies , which are both solid and temporary .
Nothing remains unchanged .
In the end , food , work , rest , talk , sex , life , and death have not ceased .
There are only new ways of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , fucking , birthing , and dying .
Soon we will remember what it was like , after it has all become different again .

In 1958, Annie is 17 years old and has barely left the small rural town in northern France where she was born, never lived with anyone but her parents, used a telephone, taken a shower, or been to a “real party,” has yet to “read Beauvoir, Proust, Virginia Woolf,” have sex or seen it depicted. She is a girl constituted by the time ahead, by all she has still to do. She has been hired to be a summer camp counselor, despite having never been trained or attended camp, eager to earn some money and independence before she goes to college in the fall. She is the first in her family to continue her education—both of her parents left school at 12 to work at farms and factories—and this status (of being the first, the exception) makes her simultaneously proud and afraid of her future. She has “a bold certainty about her own intelligence” yet “no defined self, but ‘selves’ who pass from one book to another.” Annie is at the nexus of terror and longing known as teenage girlhood, ready “to leave [home], escape the watchful gaze of her mother, the school, the town, and do what she wants: read all night, dress in black like Juliette Gréco.” And most importantly, Annie, who describes herself as “Catholic and working class, of peasant origin,” wants to fall in love. Books in Review A Girl’s Story By Annie Ernaux Buy this book
This is a familiar start to a mainstay of French literature, the story of a girl’s sexual awakening, but what follows for Annie is more like a sexual somnambulance. Within a couple of nights at the camp, the head instructor, H., takes her back to her room after the welcome party. He is older, engaged to be married, essentially her boss. Within five minutes of their encounter, he comes on her face, having tried and failed to penetrate her. By the next morning, a crush has descended. She falls madly in love with him, willfully salvaging whatever scraps of romance she can. The next night she lies on the floor with a group of counselors, teenage couples in darkness, “united by a twilight hankering,” and, hearing that she’s easy, one boy tries to have sex with her in their sleeping bag. She weeps in the darkness, but “she does not think to get up and leave.” “The situation is neither good nor bad,” she thinks, “but somewhere between distress and the consolation a substitute body provides: the same male desire in a different body. Her body is only on loan.” These intimate memories, flushed with subjectivity, are written in the third person, “she,” a formal choice that evokes the feeling of looking back at the past, at a younger girl who no longer exists, and inhabiting that young girl in the moment, sliding away from herself, looking up at a person carelessly imposing one’s own narrative over hers.
Published in 2016 and translated into English this year, A Girl’s Story is the recollection of this summer in 1958 and its outpourings into the adult life of memoirist Annie Ernaux. The book might easily be categorized as a glinting particle within the larger constellation of Me Too writing, especially as Ernaux was vocally supportive of the movement, which was considerably less popular in France. In The New York Times this year, she said of the experiences in A Girl’s Story, “Had it been a rape, I might have been able to talk about it earlier, but I never thought about it that way.” It’s true that she is especially invested in saying what has until recently been unsayable—not because she requires permission but because her work has always traced the internal processes of “afterwardsness,” a psychoanalytic term for a remembered event’s acquisition of new or greater meaning retroactively. This can also be a cultural feeling, when something in the past, seemingly individual, transforms its shared profundity or political valence before all our eyes. Written in 2013, although coming out a few years later, A Girl’s Story predates Me Too as a narrative genre, but Ernaux’s body of work speaks to the simplest and possibly best thing Me Too offered women. It is her foundational exigency: how to remember politically, in collective form. Popular "swipe left below to view more authors"Swipe → The Evisceration of a Public University The Evisceration of a Public University Lisa M. Corrigan The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks Chris Lehmann “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash Dave Zirin How the “Brooks Brothers Riot” Set the Stage for Insurrection How the “Brooks Brothers Riot” Set the Stage for Insurrection Chris Lehmann Popular "swipe left below to view more authors"Swipe → The Evisceration of a Public University The Evisceration of a Public University Lisa M. Corrigan The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks Chris Lehmann “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash Dave Zirin How the “Brooks Brothers Riot” Set the Stage for Insurrection How the “Brooks Brothers Riot” Set the Stage for Insurrection Chris Lehmann
Across the ample particularities of over 40 years and 21 books, almost all short, subject-driven memoirs, Ernaux has fundamentally destabilized and reinvented the genre in French literature. Her subject matter is often unorthodox, bypassing stories proper for singular, stark events, as in Happening, which calmly transcribes the harrowing sequence of an illegal abortion in 1963, or whole, nonlinear lives, as in A Man’s Place and A Woman’s Story, which memorialize her father and mother, respectively. However, it is not the content of the books that makes the work so exciting but the rigorous and expansive form of their telling. Ernaux’s writing is often described, by herself and others, as keenly sociological, a category I find increasingly vague, but that might be because of the difficulties of describing a practice of literary memoir that is thoroughly rooted in class analysis—an account of one’s experiences that takes relations of capitalist production as the framing methods of understanding them. Ernaux has done repeatedly what many believe to be impossible in memoir writing: articulate the subterranean or starry machinations of economies, histories, and nations without ever sacrificing the acute truths of having a body in the world.
In A Girl’s Story, the reframing of Ernaux’s encounter with H. and the other boys at camp happens slowly. Sexual attitudes and norms are revised in fits and starts, and her memory accrues many different kinds of pleasure and anguish as the years unfold. One night in 1958 means something different in every decade that follows, up to now, when the characters read as both staunchly old-fashioned and achingly familiar. She writes of the shame that immediately blooms that summer: “It is a different kind of shame from that of being the daughter of shop- and café-keepers. It is the shame of having once been proud of being an object of desire…. the shame of being laughed at, and held in contempt. A girl’s shame.” She describes this as “shame of a historical variety.” The night with H. continues to happen inside her, and so does 1958, by extension. But in other ways, the endless remembrance of that event makes what is fixed in experience mutable through repetition. There is nothing more Ernaux than this: the subtle categorization of various shames, noticing the way they join together and stray apart, the way some belong to another time while being felt so fully in the present. She asks, Which do we carry forward, and which do we leave behind?
Shame, historical and otherwise, has always been the connective tissue of Ernaux’s work. In fact, it is the title of one of her many memoirs, published in 1999, about a brief, violent episode between her parents. She has written so many books, each pulled into tight focus on a single aspect of her life, that together they almost become chapters in one vast epic. I would recommend reading them en masse. They are a collective of their own. Stacked, the books make you feel as if you could sew them together to create a patchwork woman. In their fragmentation, they carry with them some spectral possibility of material cohesion, an entire life in sequence. But with even the most casual attempt to set them in order, this inclination is quickly dispelled. There is too much intermingling, overlap, fray. Partly this is because Ernaux is consistently amending her version of events—not correcting or contradicting herself, exactly, but complicating what she has already established to be true. She never fictionalizes but simply repeats herself. Every time she tells a story, she tells it slightly differently, stretching the membranous container of memoir to hold the same life again and again, in all its ongoing detail and paradox.
The most striking examples of this are the books about her parents. She wrote A Woman’s Story, published in French in 1988 and in English in 1991, in the months after her mother’s death. It describes her mother’s life in toto, from end to beginning to end again, a whole life coiled tightly into a slender volume. It is a record of grief’s urgency, the vertiginous need to restore the absent person to objecthood again. At first, the boundaries of such a project seem clear: a woman, a life, a book. But A Woman’s Story is the partner—a wife, one might say—to Ernaux’s A Man’s Place (1983, 1992), which tells the story of her father’s life and death. The two books are almost identical in structure, but the marriage creases across its doubled telling, folding the child, who is also the author, within its seams.
Neither life is particularly remarkable, except in the unlikely odds of their transcription. Ernaux’s parents were working-class Roman Catholics, born in rural Normandy, factory workers born to farmers, who saved up and purchased a small shop in a nearby town, above which the family lived and together ran a grocery and café. As they climbed from manual laborers to business owners, their child was able to continue school and become a teacher, a writer, an intellectual, the unimaginable descendant of her grandfather, who couldn’t read or write. Mary Gaitskill’s Art of Loneliness Maggie Doherty
It is a plain story, told in plain language. Ernaux does not silently justify the telling of it with ornate phrasing, belle lettres, throwing poetry over their lives like a net, hauling back meaning. This stylistic choice was quite deliberate for her. “If I wish to tell the story of a life governed by necessity, I have no right to adopt an artistic approach…. No lyrical reminiscences, no triumphant displays of irony. This neutral way of writing comes to me naturally. It was the same style I used when I wrote home telling my parents the latest news.” Nothing dramatic happens in either book, in a traditional sense, except her jump in class positions. Conflicts remain mostly unspoken and unresolved, her parents’ marriage remains intact, and the sorrow of their stories comes not in narrative eruptions but in the slow unfurling of childhood poverty across adult lives. It’s no different from most. And yet at the end of A Man’s Place, you weep, because a person lived, and then that person died. What ending were you expecting?
Ernaux’s straightforwardness is often mistaken as purely analytical, an acquired sociological voice rather than a colloquial style rooted in her history. Perhaps this is because of her unwavering clarity about class hierarchy, how it shapes lives, deaths, and personhood. In A Woman’s Story, she never detaches her mother from the economic system of which she is a part. “When I think of my mother’s violent temper, outbursts of affection, and reproachful attitude, I try not to see them as facets of her personality but to relate them to her own story and social background.” The emotional permutations of her family’s everyday life are steeped in “necessity,” as she calls it, material survival, and as Ernaux leaves home and becomes bourgeois—someone who luxuriates in ideas and is paid to do so, who hushes her young children in the train’s first-class carriage, who travels for pleasure, who gets divorced, who lives in a large city—the dynamic between her and her parents becomes strained by their widening difference. Pride and shame intertwine. Her father’s “greatest satisfaction, possibly even the raison d’être of his existence, was the fact that [she] belonged to the world which had scorned him.” She describes their family as a “fractured love,” a document of class experience.
Ernaux’s materialist lens might be austere, but her writing is never cold. It is her attention to class as the animate, abiding foundation of her parents’ lives that produces the most searing moments of embodiment. After her father dies, in bed at home, she recounts how the staircase of their house was too narrow for the coffin. “The body had to be wrapped in a plastic bag and dragged, rather than carried, to the coffin which lay downstairs in the middle of the café, closed for an hour. It was a laborious operation, punctuated by the men’s comments on the best way to proceed.” She does not linger over this scene. The image of the corpse thumping down a cramped staircase is heightened and brutal, but the sentence snags on “closed for an hour.” How to grieve, when a single hour is all the business you can afford to lose? The day continues, and her husband arrives “in the evening, suntanned, embarrassed by a bereavement in which he had no part.” “He seemed more out of place then than he had ever been,” she observes. “We slept in the only double bed, the one where my father had died.” The young pair climb into the furrowed sheets, haunted and warm.
The haunting of Ernaux is also verbal, a phantom behind every sentence. Language is where she and her parents become the most severed from one another, and she points to the scar and the shadow of her speech. In A Man’s Place, there are sporadic phrasings and idioms that she italicizes, a marker that almost functions as quotations, “because these particular words and sentences define the nature and the limits of the world where my father lived.” These include “There were others worse off,” “You don’t want ideas when you’re in trade,” “We were happy in spite of everything,” “out of place,” “town clothes,” “you slut,” “good manners,” “Gauloises,” and “to live,” as in “Books and music are all right for you. I don’t need them to live.” Italics, usually for emphasis, are used here to denote a kind of collective authorship, the words that don’t belong, particularly, to Ernaux. Her father’s parents spoke only the local dialect, but her father “saw patois as something old and ugly, a sign of inferiority…. Even if his French wasn’t perfect, at least it was French.”
In The Years, Ernaux’s memoir about her generation and its origins, she easily reverts to patois at home, “the language that clung to the body, was linked to slaps in the face, the Javel water smell of work coats, baked apples all winter long, the sound of piss in the night bucket, and the parents’ snoring.” This double reality means that “as a child, when [she] tried to express [herself] correctly, it was like walking down a dark tunnel.” Just as standard French and local dialect marked the difference between her father and her grandparents, so her French and that of her father diverge. “Because the schoolmistress corrected me, I naturally wished to correct my father and tell him that expressions like ‘to disremember’ and ‘somewhen’ simply didn’t exist. He flew into a terrible rage…. I realize now that anything to do with language was a source of resentment and distress, far more than the subject of money.” Ironically, I cannot imagine a more profound description of Ernaux’s life project than to disremember the somewhen.
“What is the belief that drives her, if not that memory is a form of knowledge?” Ernaux asks in A Girl’s Story. In A Woman’s Story, she describes her grandmother’s craft of domesticity, the way she kept everything, the skin off the milk to bake with, the ashes of the fire for laundry. “This knowledge—handed down from mother to daughter for many centuries—stops at my generation. I am only the archivist.” The transmission of memory from one to the other, the promise that memory can be cracked open and made communal, made infectious or inherited, is the undercurrent that flows beneath the jagged, stony surface of Ernaux’s books. She speaks in proxy, for her mother and father and for her past self, who is neither hers nor theirs. The Years, which has been called her magnum opus, brims with this mutuality and spills into a new form. In the book (published in French in 2008 and in English, translated by Alison L. Strayer, in 2017), Ernaux writes the story of her life using a collective “we.” In French it is the je collectif, nous and on, formal and intimate variations of groupness that we don’t have in English. Beginning with her birth in 1940 and ending when she is a grandmother in 2006, The Years is both a detailed cultural history of the postwar generation in France and a literary account of what it feels like to witness history happening—the steady, increscent glow of shared reality. Related Article C Pam Zhang’s Radical Retelling of Western Myths Larissa Pham
The opening of The Years is cinematic—a montage of details, the shivers of juxtaposition, a proclamation of doom. “All the images will disappear.” Ernaux’s images (a woman pissing on the edge of her town’s bombed ruins, the tears of the movie star Alida Valli, a newborn with limbs flailing, an ad for a dishwashing liquid) stack and stack, an index of her memories and others’, rolling in and out of the individual like waves against a beach. Eventually, the book congregates around the scene of a big family lunch. This remains the tether through the next 60 years, as grandmothers, mothers, and babies lay their lives over one another like veils or blankets. The family’s voices “compose the great narrative of collective events, which we came to believe we too had witnessed.” It is this assemblage that Ernaux is archiving, but it is not purely familial. Like shame, it is historical, and like love, it is classed. When the workers speak, “from a common ground of hunger and fear, everything was told in the ‘we’ voice and with impersonal pronouns.” Ernaux moves through the 20th century in this voice, a choral document.
But the working class is not a static subject. Its shape changes more rapidly and drastically over the course of Ernaux’s life than anyone could have anticipated, and her identity within it becomes unclear. She was born in Nazi-occupied France, but the book opens in her early childhood after the fall of the Vichy regime in 1944, and it closes in despondent anticipation of conservative Nicolas Sarkozy’s 2007 presidency and the impending financial crisis. From the echoes of subsistence agriculture, Fordist factory work, and the petit bourgeois business, Ernaux becomes a Parisian intellectual, mother to young professionals in a globalized economy. In this new paradigm, she pushes the vestiges of a very particular social demographic (the white rural workers of midcentury northern France) into a larger question of how people gather around the past, circling into groups, doing and undoing identity in the process.
In the 1940s and ’50s, the oral tradition of her parents and grandparents was spoken in “a language without praise or flattery…express[ing] reasonable desires and expectations: clean work, an indoor workplace, enough to eat, dying in bed.” By the mid-1960s, as rebellious twentysomethings, “we saw the family milieu from the outside as a closed world that was no longer ours. The ideas that possessed us were alien to illness and factory layoffs, vegetables to be planted with the waxing moon.” By the 1970s, the meal is shared among new parents and the trendy Parisians who have moved in next door, in search of rural authenticity. The number of active farmers in France went from 7.4 million in 1946 to 2 million in 1975, leading to a boom in empty farmhouses, quickly filled. As the 1980s near and Ernaux turns 40, “we instinctively avoided topics that awakened the old social longings and cultural differences, and instead examined the present we shared…. The recitations of memories from the war and the Occupation had virtually ceased.” Where is the family meal of ’68? She watches much of that fateful May on television. Only a few years older at the time than the students, she was already married with a child when that revolution appeared.
In The Years, the latter half of the 20th century includes a massive reallocation of memory: the outsourcing of the archive. As Ernaux’s class identity transforms, so does the texture of recollection. During her childhood, the family structure was the container of the past, in which the realities of the factory, the village, and the farm were held suspended in a tight weave of gossip, anecdote, and craft. Previously, history was “passed body to body, over the years…a repertory of habits and gestures shaped by childhoods in the fields.” After upheavals in technology, education, and language, by the mid-1980s, “the time-before vanished from family tables, and fled the bodies and voices of its witnesses. It appeared on television in documentary archives with commentary by voices that came from nowhere. The ‘duty of remembrance’ was a civic obligation, the sign of a just conscience, a new patriotism.” By the turn of the millennium, “the media took charge of the process of memory and forgetting. It commemorated everything that could be commemorated, the appeal of Abbé Pierre, the deaths of [François] Mitterrand and Marguerite Duras, the beginnings and ends of wars, the first step on the moon, Chernobyl, September 11. Every day was an anniversary of something.” Ernaux elegantly reveals that it is not only the content of our memories, what it includes and what it elides, that makes up our culture but also what form that remembering takes, how the past is distributed among the collective and by whom.
The present century is crowded, the town square has gone digital, and there is nothing as claustrophobic as a future that shrinks as we step further into it. At the end of the book, Ernaux observes that the weather is changing—our most lurid understatement of 2006. With the Internet, there came “the inability to picture our lives in ten years’ time, or ourselves perfectly adapted to technologies yet unknown. (Someday, would we be able to see, imprinted on a person’s brain, everything they had done, said, seen, and heard?)” With the ease of photography, “the obscurity of previous centuries would disappear forever…. We were resurrected ahead of time.” The abstract deathliness of this new, constant archive converges with her approaching old age. The elasticity of Ernaux’s “we” loosens. The source of its knowledge dims and surges: The speaker stands, and contexts grow over her like moss.
Ernaux writes “the memory of collective memory in an individual memory…from inside her language, which is everyone’s language,” a game of telephone with oneself and the world. She is wed to her origins, but they are never romanticized. If anything, the new ways of living and remembering that have developed over her lifetime allow her to experiment with memoir as a genre. Ernaux does not hark back to a reproduction of oral histories; she furthers the shifts of language as she documents them. The political consequences of such a project are sustained in every work, as gender constrains and transforms, sex loops and unravels, and economies are embedded in bodies, which are both solid and temporary. Nothing remains unchanged. In the end, food, work, rest, talk, sex, life, and death have not ceased. There are only new ways of eating, making, sleeping, laughing, fucking, birthing, and dying. Soon we will remember what it was like, after it has all become different again.


thenation--2020-11-19--My Neighbors Certainly Didn’t Celebrate Biden’s Win, but They Also Didn’t Publicly Mourn Trump’s Los

My Neighbors Certainly Didn’t Celebrate Biden’s Win, but They Also Didn’t Publicly Mourn Trump’s Loss

The line stretched most of the way around the inside of the firehouse when I went to vote on Election Day .
By the time I left , an hour later , it had started snaking back and forth at one end of the building because the hundred or so people waiting to vote had nowhere else to go .
At one point , a neighbor who was acting as a poll watcher spotted me and came by .
As we chatted for a few minutes , I became aware that hardly anyone apart from us was talking , despite @ @ @ @ @ @ @ York town of under 3,000 there must have been plenty of people who knew each other .
This was not a scene from a Norman Rockwell “ democracy at work ” painting ; rather , it conveyed a sense that voting , at least in this election , was a joyless enterprise .
I thought about the firehouse scene in the days that followed , and especially after the presidential election was called for Joe Biden .
Those people waiting to vote were about to help give Trump over 60 percent of the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ four years ago .
But they didn ’ t look very excited by the prospect , and in the days following the election , I didn ’ t hear of any nearby rallies in Trump ’ s support .
Maybe , I thought , news reports during the campaign had overstated the passion for Trump in rural areas .
Still , there weren ’ t any Democrats celebrating in the streets either .
Yes , Biden won nationwide .
But Greene County voters not only decisively chose his opponent but also overwhelmingly supported @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to make Democratic Representative Antonio Delgado ’ s reelection closer to a squeaker than a mandate .
Hardly the stuff to inspire a victory party .
One Black Lives Matter Protest in Rural New York Opens the Door to Change As Democrats Leave Cities , Rural Areas See an Uptick in Voter Registration More in this series But now , a few days after the election , everyone seems to be just getting on with their lives .
People are worrying about the rising number of Covid cases and the weak economy , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , wondering whether this is going to be one of those winters like the last , when spring didn ’ t arrive until June .
Home improvement ads have replaced political rants on community Facebook pages , and political gossip has returned to the latest spat among members of the ( all-Republican ) town board .
Probably the memories that will stay with me the longest from these recent months are not political , in the literal sense , at all .
Rather , they are examples of what Biden talked about in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ability of people with differing viewpoints to work together for the common good .
One example of this is a development plan that was created by a town board–appointed committee including both Democrats and Republicans .
It was adopted in July and is already being implemented with the help of a similarly mixed group of volunteer residents .
On a more personal scale , my husband and the staunch Republican who gave him a “ guns 101 ” session at a local shooting range after they expressed opposing views on gun use during @ @ @ @ @ @ @ I wrote about ) are now friendly enough to regularly discuss local issues , most recently a strategy to improve the local ambulance service .
I ’ d like to leave you ( this is the last in a year-long series of reports ) with a story that I hope will give you a laugh while also lending credence to Biden ’ s belief in Americans ’ basic decency and sense of fair play .
If he ’ s right , and if my observations over the past year are accurate , there @ @ @ @ @ @ @ post-Trump America may not be so hard after all .
The story involves an incident that happened not long before the election , when the town supervisor and I were sitting on my front porch while we went over next year ’ s budget for an article I was writing for the town newsletter .
It was late in the day , and the porch was already in shadows .
The supervisor is not only a gun-loving Republican but also the chair of the local Republican committee and , in his day job @ @ @ @ @ @ @ arrived , I asked him if he ’ d feel more comfortable sitting behind the house where no one could see him , since we live on a main road and , at the time , had three Democratic yard signs on the lawn plus a home-made Black Lives Matter sign near the front door .
He scoffed and said it wasn ’ t a problem .
About 45 minutes later , as we were wrapping up , a pickup truck sporting a huge Trump flag passed the house .
The driver , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of figures sitting outside , hurled an epithet in our direction as he gunned his truck and drove by .
I turned to look at the supervisor , wondering what his reaction would be .
“ I know that guy , ” he said , his face unsmiling but with maybe—I could have been imagining it—a hint of amusement in his eyes .
“ I ’ ll have a word with him .
”

Subscribe to The Nation Subscribe now for as little as $2 a month! Subscribe now for as little as $2 a month!
Get The Nation’s Weekly Newsletter Fridays. The best of the week. Email By signing up, you confirm that you are over the age of 16 and agree to receive occasional promotional offers for programs that support The Nation’s journalism. You can read our Privacy Policy here. Fridays. The best of the week.
Thank you for signing up for The Nation’s weekly newsletter.
Repro Nation A monthly newsletter on the global fight for reproductive freedom. Email By signing up, you confirm that you are over the age of 16 and agree to receive occasional promotional offers for programs that support The Nation’s journalism. You can read our Privacy Policy here.
Thank you for signing up. For more from The Nation, check out our latest issue
Subscribe to The Nation Subscribe now for as little as $2 a month! Subscribe now for as little as $2 a month!
Support Progressive Journalism The Nation is reader supported: Chip in $10 or more to help us continue to write about the issues that matter. The Nation is reader supported: Chip in $10 or more to help us continue to write about the issues that matter.
Sign up for our Wine Club today. Did you know you can support The Nation by drinking wine?
The line stretched most of the way around the inside of the firehouse when I went to vote on Election Day. By the time I left, an hour later, it had started snaking back and forth at one end of the building because the hundred or so people waiting to vote had nowhere else to go.
At one point, a neighbor who was acting as a poll watcher spotted me and came by. As we chatted for a few minutes, I became aware that hardly anyone apart from us was talking, despite the fact that in my upstate New York town of under 3,000 there must have been plenty of people who knew each other. This was not a scene from a Norman Rockwell “democracy at work” painting; rather, it conveyed a sense that voting, at least in this election, was a joyless enterprise.
I thought about the firehouse scene in the days that followed, and especially after the presidential election was called for Joe Biden. Those people waiting to vote were about to help give Trump over 60 percent of the presidential vote in Greene County—slightly higher than four years ago. But they didn’t look very excited by the prospect, and in the days following the election, I didn’t hear of any nearby rallies in Trump’s support. Maybe, I thought, news reports during the campaign had overstated the passion for Trump in rural areas.
Still, there weren’t any Democrats celebrating in the streets either. Yes, Biden won nationwide. But Greene County voters not only decisively chose his opponent but also overwhelmingly supported Republican local and state candidates and helped to make Democratic Representative Antonio Delgado’s reelection closer to a squeaker than a mandate. Hardly the stuff to inspire a victory party. All Politics Is Local Trump’s Response to Losing the Vote Calvin Trillin One Black Lives Matter Protest in Rural New York Opens the Door to Change Karen Rothmyer As Democrats Leave Cities, Rural Areas See an Uptick in Voter Registration Karen Rothmyer
But now, a few days after the election, everyone seems to be just getting on with their lives. People are worrying about the rising number of Covid cases and the weak economy, and, after two snowstorms in October, wondering whether this is going to be one of those winters like the last, when spring didn’t arrive until June. Home improvement ads have replaced political rants on community Facebook pages, and political gossip has returned to the latest spat among members of the (all-Republican) town board.
Probably the memories that will stay with me the longest from these recent months are not political, in the literal sense, at all. Rather, they are examples of what Biden talked about in his first speech as president-elect: the ability of people with differing viewpoints to work together for the common good. One example of this is a development plan that was created by a town board–appointed committee including both Democrats and Republicans. It was adopted in July and is already being implemented with the help of a similarly mixed group of volunteer residents. On a more personal scale, my husband and the staunch Republican who gave him a “guns 101” session at a local shooting range after they expressed opposing views on gun use during a town board debate (an incident I wrote about) are now friendly enough to regularly discuss local issues, most recently a strategy to improve the local ambulance service. Current Issue View our current issue
I’d like to leave you (this is the last in a year-long series of reports) with a story that I hope will give you a laugh while also lending credence to Biden’s belief in Americans’ basic decency and sense of fair play. If he’s right, and if my observations over the past year are accurate, there is reason to think that building a post-Trump America may not be so hard after all.
The story involves an incident that happened not long before the election, when the town supervisor and I were sitting on my front porch while we went over next year’s budget for an article I was writing for the town newsletter. It was late in the day, and the porch was already in shadows.
The supervisor is not only a gun-loving Republican but also the chair of the local Republican committee and, in his day job, a deputy sheriff.
When he arrived, I asked him if he’d feel more comfortable sitting behind the house where no one could see him, since we live on a main road and, at the time, had three Democratic yard signs on the lawn plus a home-made Black Lives Matter sign near the front door. He scoffed and said it wasn’t a problem.
About 45 minutes later, as we were wrapping up, a pickup truck sporting a huge Trump flag passed the house. The driver, seeing the yard signs and a couple of figures sitting outside, hurled an epithet in our direction as he gunned his truck and drove by.
I turned to look at the supervisor, wondering what his reaction would be. “I know that guy,” he said, his face unsmiling but with maybe—I could have been imagining it—a hint of amusement in his eyes. “I’ll have a word with him.”


thenation--2020-11-19--Who’s in Charge of the Democratic Party?

Who is in charge of the Democratic Party ?
In particular , who is in charge of its strategy and spending ?
That ’ s actually a surprisingly difficult question to answer—and it shouldn ’ t be , at a time when the party and the country face critical challenges that will affect millions of lives for years to come .
The next six weeks will see significant turnover in the staffing and leadership of the biggest organizations in the Democratic ecosystem , but many of those decisions will be made in metaphorical smoke-filled rooms , shielded from the kinds @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of effective and successful organizations .
What is commonly called “ the Democratic Party ” is actually a constellation of six entities that , collectively , spent more than $ 1.3 billion in the 2020 election cycle .
Even in the most public process—as with the Democratic National Committee , where bylaws clearly explain the process for electing a chair—it remains unclear how to even put one ’ s name in the hat to be considered for the top job .
Despite raising and spending hundreds of millions of dollars from Democratic donors @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Senate Majority PAC , and Priorities USA—operate with the least level of accountability , frequently making leadership changes without posting positions , searching for talent , articulating the key responsibilities of the position , or even revealing who is in fact doing the hiring .
With respect to the campaign arms of the Senate and House Democrats , the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee ( DSCC ) and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee ( DCCC ) , there is some measure of clarity regarding who becomes the chair of each entity .
The Democratic @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Schumer , and that leader typically picks the chair of the DSCC .
On the House side , the members directly vote for the chair of the DCCC ( before 2018 , the leader of the House Dems choose the committee chair ) .
These Are the States to Focus on to Flip the Senate This Is the Perfect Moment to Push for Reparations While those lines of authority are clear , what happens next is not .
The incoming chairs choose an executive director , who then hires the rest of the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ day-to-day operations .
Over the past decade , dating back to my work in 2008 helping to create a Diversity Talent Bank of 5,000 diverse candidates interested in working in the Obama-Biden administration , I have rarely , if ever , seen a job description circulated for the top staff position of these entities .
At best , these poor practices undermine their ability to function at optimal levels .
At worst , they result in the kind of that occurred last year , when Congressional Black Caucus and Hispanic Caucus members loudly @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the DCCC staff assembled by then–executive director Allison Jaslow .
Absent clear criteria for what the job entails and with no process in place for a healthy range of promising contenders to offer their expertise , the pool of potential people to fill those positions is , almost by definition , limited to the friends and family of a small circle of insiders .
The window for fixing these processes and pulling in the talent regularly walled off from participating in the biggest and richest organizations in the ecosystem is closing fast .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ filled between now and mid-December , while attention is focused elsewhere .
Now more than ever , Democrats need all hands on deck to analyze what happened in 2020 and chart a course forward .
There are no more compelling examples than the results in Arizona and Georgia .
The Biden campaign invested little in Georgia , and Arizona did not receive the same level of attention as the Midwestern triumvirate of Michigan , Wisconsin , and Pennsylvania .
Yet , winning those Southwestern and Southern states was essential to securing a victory @ @ @ @ @ @ @ plans to steal the election through cries of fraud and appeals to the GOP-packed courts ( with Trump revealing the game plan on election night , when he said he was going to take his allegations to the Supreme Court ) .
Going forward , given the continuing demographic transformation of the country , smart Democratic leaders will build on those successes in the South and Southwest to solidify and expand progressive power .
Victory in those states was not charted by the handful of consultants who dominate Democratic politics ( in fact @ @ @ @ @ @ @ we found that Senate Majority PAC had invested $ 0 of its first $ 80 million of expenditures in the Georgia Senate races , on which control of the Senate now turns ) .
If the party wants to win , it should learn from those who actually won in what was formerly hostile territory , and bring their insights and understanding into the rooms where it happens .
But quick , quiet , closed-door hiring practices inevitably lock out much of the available talent and knowledge .
Although Trump has been defeated @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , and the stakes going forward are enormous .
Despite losing support from some college-educated white voters , Trump brought millions more people to the polls , causing Democrats to lose several House and Senate races they thought they would win .
In light of this reality , the next Democratic leadership team must confront several critical questions : • Why did Democratic candidates fall short of expectations in congressional races ?
• What explains the party ’ s weakness with Latino voters , especially in Florida and Texas ?
• What went @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ t translate to Florida and North Carolina ?
• What is the right balance—and allocation of resources—between solidifying support in communities of color and trying to hold or increase support among white voters ?
• What is the right balance between spending on television ads ( still the preferred investment of choice by many consultants ) and grassroots mobilization of the kind done in Georgia and Arizona to help turn those states blue ?
If the Democrats are going to get it right , they need to pull back the curtain on @ @ @ @ @ @ @ up the process to the full diversity of the party ’ s talent , and clearly explain what qualities they are looking for in the leadership of the future .
Specifically , they should take four immediate steps : • : Job descriptions should be written and widely circulated for all top positions , including executive directors .
What are the qualifications ?
Who exactly makes the hiring decisions ?
How do you apply—and to whom ?
• .
Notice I didn ’ t say “ hire people of color ” ( although @ @ @ @ @ @ @ hire people of color ! )
.
Too often , consultants think that racial issues are something that only relate to people of color .
Cultural competence , however , refers to the ability to also communicate with white people about racial issues .
Racial identity is one of most clear-cut determinants of political behavior , and the political environment today is highly racially charged .
Trump understands this , and that ’ s why he was able to garner such enthusiastic support .
As a rule , people of color are more @ @ @ @ @ @ @ they ’ ve had to navigate the realities of race and racism their entire lives .
Some whites have , in fact , developed cultural competence , but it ’ s a skill set and talent that ’ s largely missing from much of the Democratic ecosystem .
The incoming staff and leadership will determine how much of the party ’ s hundreds of millions of dollars will be spent on research seeking to understand why voters of color sit out elections—and how much will be spent on anxious whites fearful about losing @ @ @ @ @ @ @ leadership is critical if we want to productively explore and answer those questions .
• : We are seeing lots of recriminations about Democrats ’ losing seats in the House , but most of that commentary is driven by fact-free , preexisting biases that are not supported by empirical evidence .
The conventional wisdom that the Black Lives Matter demand to defund the police weakened Democratic performance is contradicted by data showing that Democratic candidates actually significantly improved their performance over 2018 ( the incumbents who lost fell short despite garnering an average @ @ @ @ @ @ @ The problem was that the Republican increase was even greater .
Whatever remedies are pursued in 2021 must be tied to an accurate diagnosis of what happened in 2020 .
Calamity has been averted with the defeat of Trump , but entrenched and ferocious opposition to progressive values in a rapidly diversifying nation is only going to increase .
If the Democratic Party is going to win the battles to come , it needs to change its hiring practices so that it can find , elevate , and empower people who know how @ @ @ @ @ @ @ are on the horizon .

Subscribe to The Nation Subscribe now for as little as $2 a month! Subscribe now for as little as $2 a month!
Get The Nation’s Weekly Newsletter Fridays. The best of the week. Email By signing up, you confirm that you are over the age of 16 and agree to receive occasional promotional offers for programs that support The Nation’s journalism. You can read our Privacy Policy here. Fridays. The best of the week.
Thank you for signing up for The Nation’s weekly newsletter.
Repro Nation A monthly newsletter on the global fight for reproductive freedom. Email By signing up, you confirm that you are over the age of 16 and agree to receive occasional promotional offers for programs that support The Nation’s journalism. You can read our Privacy Policy here.
Thank you for signing up. For more from The Nation, check out our latest issue
Subscribe to The Nation Subscribe now for as little as $2 a month! Subscribe now for as little as $2 a month!
Support Progressive Journalism The Nation is reader supported: Chip in $10 or more to help us continue to write about the issues that matter. The Nation is reader supported: Chip in $10 or more to help us continue to write about the issues that matter.
Sign up for our Wine Club today. Did you know you can support The Nation by drinking wine?
Who is in charge of the Democratic Party? In particular, who is in charge of its strategy and spending? That’s actually a surprisingly difficult question to answer—and it shouldn’t be, at a time when the party and the country face critical challenges that will affect millions of lives for years to come. The next six weeks will see significant turnover in the staffing and leadership of the biggest organizations in the Democratic ecosystem, but many of those decisions will be made in metaphorical smoke-filled rooms, shielded from the kinds of transparency and accountability that are hallmarks of effective and successful organizations.
What is commonly called “the Democratic Party” is actually a constellation of six entities that, collectively, spent more than $1.3 billion in the 2020 election cycle.
(Source: Federal Election Commission)
Even in the most public process—as with the Democratic National Committee, where bylaws clearly explain the process for electing a chair—it remains unclear how to even put one’s name in the hat to be considered for the top job. Despite raising and spending hundreds of millions of dollars from Democratic donors, the super PACs—House Majority PAC, Senate Majority PAC, and Priorities USA—operate with the least level of accountability, frequently making leadership changes without posting positions, searching for talent, articulating the key responsibilities of the position, or even revealing who is in fact doing the hiring.
With respect to the campaign arms of the Senate and House Democrats, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC) and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC), there is some measure of clarity regarding who becomes the chair of each entity. The Democratic senators select their leader, currently Chuck Schumer, and that leader typically picks the chair of the DSCC. On the House side, the members directly vote for the chair of the DCCC (before 2018, the leader of the House Dems choose the committee chair). More From Steve Phillips These Are the States to Focus on to Flip the Senate Steve Phillips Why Are Democratic Super PACs Wasting Millions? Steve Phillips This Is the Perfect Moment to Push for Reparations Steve Phillips
While those lines of authority are clear, what happens next is not. The incoming chairs choose an executive director, who then hires the rest of the staff, who in turn run the day-to-day operations.
Over the past decade, dating back to my work in 2008 helping to create a Diversity Talent Bank of 5,000 diverse candidates interested in working in the Obama-Biden administration, I have rarely, if ever, seen a job description circulated for the top staff position of these entities. At best, these poor practices undermine their ability to function at optimal levels. At worst, they result in the kind of diversity debacle that occurred last year, when Congressional Black Caucus and Hispanic Caucus members loudly complained about the overwhelmingly monochromatic composition of the DCCC staff assembled by then–executive director Allison Jaslow.
Absent clear criteria for what the job entails and with no process in place for a healthy range of promising contenders to offer their expertise, the pool of potential people to fill those positions is, almost by definition, limited to the friends and family of a small circle of insiders. Popular "swipe left below to view more authors"Swipe → The Evisceration of a Public University The Evisceration of a Public University Lisa M. Corrigan The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks Chris Lehmann “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash Dave Zirin How the “Brooks Brothers Riot” Set the Stage for Insurrection How the “Brooks Brothers Riot” Set the Stage for Insurrection Chris Lehmann Popular "swipe left below to view more authors"Swipe → The Evisceration of a Public University The Evisceration of a Public University Lisa M. Corrigan The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks Chris Lehmann “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash Dave Zirin How the “Brooks Brothers Riot” Set the Stage for Insurrection How the “Brooks Brothers Riot” Set the Stage for Insurrection Chris Lehmann Current Issue View our current issue
The window for fixing these processes and pulling in the talent regularly walled off from participating in the biggest and richest organizations in the ecosystem is closing fast. Many of the key positions will be filled between now and mid-December, while attention is focused elsewhere.
Now more than ever, Democrats need all hands on deck to analyze what happened in 2020 and chart a course forward. There are no more compelling examples than the results in Arizona and Georgia. The Biden campaign invested little in Georgia, and Arizona did not receive the same level of attention as the Midwestern triumvirate of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. Yet, winning those Southwestern and Southern states was essential to securing a victory large enough to block Trump’s plans to steal the election through cries of fraud and appeals to the GOP-packed courts (with Trump revealing the game plan on election night, when he said he was going to take his allegations to the Supreme Court). Going forward, given the continuing demographic transformation of the country, smart Democratic leaders will build on those successes in the South and Southwest to solidify and expand progressive power.
Victory in those states was not charted by the handful of consultants who dominate Democratic politics (in fact, in the Report Cards we did in August, we found that Senate Majority PAC had invested $0 of its first $80 million of expenditures in the Georgia Senate races, on which control of the Senate now turns). If the party wants to win, it should learn from those who actually won in what was formerly hostile territory, and bring their insights and understanding into the rooms where it happens. But quick, quiet, closed-door hiring practices inevitably lock out much of the available talent and knowledge.
Although Trump has been defeated, the battle is far from finished, and the stakes going forward are enormous. Despite losing support from some college-educated white voters, Trump brought millions more people to the polls, causing Democrats to lose several House and Senate races they thought they would win. In light of this reality, the next Democratic leadership team must confront several critical questions:
Why did Democratic candidates fall short of expectations in congressional races?
What explains the party’s weakness with Latino voters, especially in Florida and Texas?
What went right in Georgia and Arizona that didn’t translate to Florida and North Carolina?
What is the right balance—and allocation of resources—between solidifying support in communities of color and trying to hold or increase support among white voters?
What is the right balance between spending on television ads (still the preferred investment of choice by many consultants) and grassroots mobilization of the kind done in Georgia and Arizona to help turn those states blue?
If the Democrats are going to get it right, they need to pull back the curtain on who is making the decisions, open up the process to the full diversity of the party’s talent, and clearly explain what qualities they are looking for in the leadership of the future. Specifically, they should take four immediate steps:
Provide transparency in hiring : Job descriptions should be written and widely circulated for all top positions, including executive directors. What are the qualifications? Who exactly makes the hiring decisions? How do you apply—and to whom?
: Job descriptions should be written and widely circulated for all top positions, including executive directors. What are the qualifications? Who exactly makes the hiring decisions? How do you apply—and to whom? Insist on cultural competence . Notice I didn’t say “hire people of color” (although, let me say it now, hire people of color!). Too often, consultants think that racial issues are something that only relate to people of color. Cultural competence, however, refers to the ability to also communicate with white people about racial issues. Racial identity is one of most clear-cut determinants of political behavior, and the political environment today is highly racially charged. Trump understands this, and that’s why he was able to garner such enthusiastic support. As a rule, people of color are more culturally competent than white people, because they’ve had to navigate the realities of race and racism their entire lives. Some whites have, in fact, developed cultural competence, but it’s a skill set and talent that’s largely missing from much of the Democratic ecosystem. The incoming staff and leadership will determine how much of the party’s hundreds of millions of dollars will be spent on research seeking to understand why voters of color sit out elections—and how much will be spent on anxious whites fearful about losing their way of life? Culturally competent leadership is critical if we want to productively explore and answer those questions.
. Notice I didn’t say “hire people of color” (although, let me say it now, hire people of color!). Too often, consultants think that racial issues are something that only relate to people of color. Cultural competence, however, refers to the ability to also communicate with white people about racial issues. Racial identity is one of most clear-cut determinants of political behavior, and the political environment today is highly racially charged. Trump understands this, and that’s why he was able to garner such enthusiastic support. As a rule, people of color are more culturally competent than white people, because they’ve had to navigate the realities of race and racism their entire lives. Some whites have, in fact, developed cultural competence, but it’s a skill set and talent that’s largely missing from much of the Democratic ecosystem. The incoming staff and leadership will determine how much of the party’s hundreds of millions of dollars will be spent on research seeking to understand why voters of color sit out elections—and how much will be spent on anxious whites fearful about losing their way of life? Culturally competent leadership is critical if we want to productively explore and answer those questions. Conduct data-driven post-mortems on the 2020 results : We are seeing lots of recriminations about Democrats’ losing seats in the House, but most of that commentary is driven by fact-free, preexisting biases that are not supported by empirical evidence. The conventional wisdom that the Black Lives Matter demand to defund the police weakened Democratic performance is contradicted by data showing that Democratic candidates actually significantly improved their performance over 2018 (the incumbents who lost fell short despite garnering an average 25 percent increase in votes). The problem was that the Republican increase was even greater. Whatever remedies are pursued in 2021 must be tied to an accurate diagnosis of what happened in 2020.
Calamity has been averted with the defeat of Trump, but entrenched and ferocious opposition to progressive values in a rapidly diversifying nation is only going to increase. If the Democratic Party is going to win the battles to come, it needs to change its hiring practices so that it can find, elevate, and empower people who know how to win the kinds of fights that are on the horizon.