“Writing is the ultimate recourse for those who have betrayed.” – Jean Genet

Annie Ernaux usually writes short memoirs about a certain period in her life or about a member of her family. A Man’s Place is about her father. She starts the book with the above epigraph. Ernaux thinks that she betrayed her father by rising to another social class.

Ernaux’s father was a simple, hard-working man who came from the working class. He was able to buy a café and a store and was able to have a glimpse of the middle-class world. Still, he never belonged there and never stopped feeling inferior. However, he was able to educate his daughter, our author, and she entered the middle class he so craved to belong to. She, in turn, stripped everything she learnt of their world, every mannerism upon entering the new world. The author writes this short memoir after his death out of the guilt she feels for rising above her father’s class & for stripping herself of everything that class instilled in her.

Towards the end of the book, she says, “Now I have finished taking possession of the legacy with which I had to part when I entered the educated, bourgeois world.” This book was her apology to her father. It was her therapy.

Ernaux's writing style is straightforward and unadorned. Her clear, staccato sentences pack a punch, delivering raw emotions and personal reflections with a matter-of-fact tone. Her detached tone makes us think that she’s repeating someone else’s story. What surprised me most was how relatable it was. Our experiences are different, but I couldn’t help but feel for her. Any child who leaves home and enters the wider world is bound to feel the same. Although it was a tiny book, I took my sweet time finishing it and had to call my parents several times during the exercise.

I highly recommend "A Man's Place" to anyone seeking a relatable & thought-provoking read.