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

'Searingly honest . . . compelling, hard to read and hard to put down' Literary Review

'A frank and moving story . . . an urgent plea' Telegraph

‘Who speaks? Who is able to make themselves heard? And if this fundamental political gesture remains inaccessible to so many people who figure among the most dominated, the most dispossessed, the most vulnerable, does it not fall to artists, writers and intellectuals to speak of them and for them’

When Didier Eribon’s mother began to lose her physical and cognitive autonomy, the author and his brothers were compelled to place her in a nursing home, despite their misgivings. A few weeks later, she died.

In The Life, Old Age, and Death of a Working-Class Woman, Eribon embarks on a historical, political and personal meditation on what it means to grow old in our society, and the care we provide for those who cannot afford to pay for better services. Tracing his mother’s rapid decline – and drawing on works by Simone de Beauvoir, Norbert Elias, Annie Ernaux and Michel Foucault, among others – Eribon offers an honest, original and wide-ranging exploration of the relationship between ageing, gender and class, transmuting his own rage, sadness and shame into a strikingly nuanced portrait of the most overlooked human experience.

Translated by Michael Lucey