The Other Girl

(by Annie Ernaux, translated by Alison L. Strayer)

There are family secrets and then there are family secrets: when she was ten, Annie Ernaux heard her mother telling someone about having had “another daughter who died of diphtheria at age six.” She described this child as having “died like a little saint,” and having been “nicer than the other one,” the other one being Annie, her second daughter, who had until now thought she was a beloved only child. This book is a letter to that dead sister, Ginette, who died two years before Ernaux was born: “the invisible little girl that no one ever talked about, the absent one in every conversation. The secret.” (Ernaux’s parents never talked to her about Ginette, even when Ernaux was older, even when Ernaux and her mother were burying Ernaux’s father in a grave next to Ginette’s, and Ernaux never raised the subject with them or with any of her aunts or uncles or older cousins.) “All I’m doing here is chasing after a shadow,” she writes, talking about how she has no stories about Ginette, no idea of her personality other than from what their mother said in those few overheard sentences. Ernaux writes about her realization that she only was born because Ginette died (Ernaux’s parents were open about “their only having one child, for economic reasons”), and about other realizations too: imagining that the two of them “were rocked to sleep with the same songs,” and realizing that the images of their home and neighborhood that she remembers from her own early childhood were things Ginette would have seen too.

This is a short book, easy to read over the course of an afternoon, but I have a feeling it will stick with me, and it definitely makes me want to read more of Ernaux’s work.