Books

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

Shame is ever-present in The Life, Old Age, and Death of a Working-Class Woman, French sociologist and philosopher Didier Eribon’s theory-memoir about a woman he’s afraid to name: his mother.

It’s a sequel to his cult classic, Returning to Reims, which traces his trajectory as he attempts to erase his working-class roots to join the French intellectual elite. Examining how multiple processes of domination intersect in any given life, the narrative painfully evokes how the deterministic nature of class shaped his parents’ social world and tracks their devolving political views.

One reason for Returning’s popularity was its assertion that the mainstream left’s abandonment of the working class is to blame for their move towards nationalism and the far right – a path followed by his family, who changed their allegiance from the Communist Party to the National Front.

Alongside Eribon’s study of his family, he outlines how his life is transformed by upward mobility and the deep-seated sense of shame he develops towards his upbringing as a result.

While Returning to Reims begins with the death of his father, this new work begins with his mother’s death, which occurs soon after he places her in a nursing home.

Eribon writes that his mother’s whole life is condensed into the moment she loses autonomy: the physicality of her working-class job, the public housing she’d lived in, the inevitability of growing old, all the order of the social world combined. When she enters the public nursing home, she immediately sees someone who worked in a factory with Eribon’s father. Decades before, they had vacationed together on trips organised by his Workers’ Council.

However, even though together the residents form this portrait of a social class, the total disruption of entering a home has the effect of erasing everything that makes them individuals, as well as all their forms of collective belonging. As a result, his mother experiences “syndrome de glissement”, a term that translates to “sliding syndrome”, which is used to describe the decline of someone who appears to lose the will to live.

As he defines their relationship through anecdotes, his analysis is expansive and profound, although at times his tone is apathetic, even spiteful. There is an unresolved sense of resentment towards what his mother represents, as the last link to the social milieu he comes from. All the exhilaration in Returning to Reims is lost as he grapples with this grief.

Allen Lane, 256pp, $55

This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on June 21, 2025 as "The Life, Old Age, and Death of a Working-Class Woman".

For almost a decade, The Saturday Paper has published Australia’s leading writers and thinkers. We have pursued stories that are ignored elsewhere, covering them with sensitivity and depth. We have done this on refugee policy, on government integrity, on robo-debt, on aged care, on climate change, on the pandemic.

All our journalism is fiercely independent. It relies on the support of readers. By subscribing to The Saturday Paper, you are ensuring that we can continue to produce essential, issue-defining coverage, to dig out stories that take time, to doggedly hold to account politicians and the political class.

There are very few titles that have the freedom and the space to produce journalism like this. In a country with a concentration of media ownership unlike anything else in the world, it is vitally important. Your subscription helps make it possible.

Send this article to a friend for free.