Happy new year! I don’t set resolutions myself, but I do love a new year. (I don’t even start a new Bullet Journal; I just keep using the one I’ve got going until I run out of pages.) I did see one resolution online to drink as much tea this year as last year, and that seems reasonable. I think I’m on my way to nailing that one.

Speaking of online, if you’re on Mastodon and looking for friends, I’m at @kristenhg@mastodon.social.

I’m nearly done with the revisions of my translation of Memoirs of Celeste Mogador, first published in French in 1858. I’ve got another pass to make sure the prose is smooth in February, then it will go to the editor in March. Publication day is set for July 11, so you’ll have it in time for your Bastille Day celebration. When the cover is finalized this spring, I’ll be revealing it here at The Wingback first.

I know you know that I’m reading a lot of Annie Ernaux lately, but I’m enjoying it so much. I’m in the middle of the fourth book of the twelve that I bought from French Books Online (cannot recommend those folks enough).

I’ve been thinking about two aspects of her work that readers of The Wingback might be most interested in.

The first is for critical readers: Ernaux will often lay out very plainly what she is writing about and how she has gone about writing it. In the opening of Passion Simple, she describes exactly what inspired her to chronicle the several months of this particular affair: a grainy porno that she could barely make out because she didn’t subscribe to that channel. The book is not at all sexually pornographic, but it is emotionally naked. Or take La Place (A Man’s Place), which is about her father’s life. She tells the reader that she tried writing it as a novel and found it did not work. So she chose instead to tell his life story in plain language, using the cadences and phrasing he himself would have used as a small-town laborer who’d left school in his early teens.

Ernaux provides a kind of reader’s guide baked into the books: consider this language, think about this person, here is a choice I made during the writing process. It’s fascinating to take her up on these invitations as you read the books, and since they’re short, you have plenty of time to mull over her observations on her own work.

The second thing is for aspiring memoirists: Ernaux has focus. Take, again, Passion Simple, which is barely a hundred pages in the edition I have. It’s about an affair, but we do not learn anything at all, really, about her life outside this affair. She hardly mentions her sons; she doesn’t say much about her life before or after this period. She barely even mentions the man in question, sketching him only enough to give the reader an idea of what he’s like (there’s more about him in a later book). The book is entirely focused on her interior life during these several months of the affair.

Memoirs often begin with “My earliest memory…” and run through the minute the author types “The End.” Ernaux’s extreme focus on a particular episode, person, emotional state, or season provides a boundary within which she can explore her life in detail. She doesn’t need to create a cohesive narrative of all the disparate parts of her—or anyone’s—life; she only needs to figure out this one part in all its richness.

You can trust that I’m going to write more about Annie Ernaux in this newsletter.

I’ve been reading other things that aren’t French too, like Fay Weldon’s speech at the 1983 Booker Prize ceremony, where she calls out publishers for treating authors like dirt. There are many great lines in this speech; here’s one of the best, directed at the industry:

‘You use what is in our heads. You use us: the living us: and you don’t, quite frankly, look after your raw material very well. And as you turn into an industry, so must we turn into workers and organise. One hundred and twenty present and a handful of writers - I think you’d do without us altogether if you could.’

Pen and Ink

Not an animal this time, but a new glass dip pen and bottle of shimmery ink from Goulet Pens.