My link with my mother placed me within a collective history and a mental geography that a single word can describe: family. In her book Old Age, Simone de Beauvoir calls attention to societies studied by ethnologists where older people are the keepers of the knowledge of family genealogies. Is it not the same in our own society? It is certainly so when it comes to genealogies, and, more widely, to that social memory that is most at risk of disappearing alongside genealogies. The task of remembering in this way usually falls to women, partly because they live longer, on average, than men, but also because, in a general way, women are the ones assigned the task of maintaining family relationships and friendships throughout their lives, and so they keep the register up to date, and understand the complexity of these relationships and the changes that take place within them. So it is that in Patrimony, Philip Roth can insist about his mother: ‘it was she around whose quietly efficient presence the family had continued to cohere,’ and that she was ‘the repository of our family past, the historian of our childhood and growing up’. The point here extends beyond ‘family’ understood in the narrowest sense of the term. I am acutely aware of this now: my mother’s death has cut me off from an entire part of myself which, by way of her, remained connected with even quite distant family connections. When I came across the name ‘Eribon’ somewhere on the internet beside a name I didn’t recognise, I could always ask her: ‘Do you know who this is?’ and she would reply: ‘Yes, that’s one of your father’s brother X’s sons,’ or ‘Yes, that’s the wife of X, one of the sons of your father’s cousin,’ and so on. Her genealogical knowledge extended across several generations.

But now I will no longer have access to this kind of information. And so I lose a connection, however distant and vague it may have seemed, to an entire universe of ‘kinship’. My mother’s clarifications inevitably reintegrated me into that universe, where I would find my bearings without too much difficulty thanks to the map those few names she mentioned laid out for me, reconnecting me to the mental landscape of my childhood and adolescence as she recreated it for me.

My mother’s death cut me off from my family ‘genealogy’; but did it not also break the final threads that attached me to the social milieu I came from? This was a milieu that I had wanted to flee, and only later did I try to rediscover it, something I have managed only partially, and with a hesitating kind of rhythm. ‘I shall never hear the sound of her voice again,’ writes Annie Ernaux at the end of A Woman’s Story, having just described her mother’s death. ‘It was her voice, together with her words, her hands, and her way of moving and laughing, which linked the woman I am to the child I once was. The last bond between me and the world I come from has been severed.’ The same is true for me. It was mainly by way of my mother that my present was linked to my past, to my childhood, to the years of my adolescence. She was of course present in my memories of these periods, just as I was in hers, memories that she enjoyed sharing, sometimes with irony, sometimes with acrimony, though most frequently in a simple, factual tone, defending her stories and her versions of the facts when I challenged or contradicted her. I didn’t always like it when she described the young boy or the teenager I had been – a version of myself I had wanted to put behind me – or when she recalled things I had said that now struck me as naïve or embarrassing, or when she described clothes I would wear that, in retrospect, seemed ridiculous, so typical of a working-class boy whose only way of distinguishing himself from the other boys in his milieu was to look ‘eccentric’, as my mother used to say, even though I still looked working-class to the other students at the lycée, who, for the most part, came from more privileged backgrounds, both economically and culturally. (These weren’t the children of the ‘grande bourgeoisie’ of Reims, of course. They sent their children to the private Catholic schools in the city, where they wouldn’t run any danger of being exposed to the ‘propaganda’ of ‘Communist’ teachers who were thought to ‘populate’ public schools. They went where they would be given a traditional and conservative education, safeguarded from the turpitudes of the surrounding world, with its leftist ideas and principles of social justice and secularism.)

There was a day when I went to school wearing an orange shirt and a purple tie and was summoned to the principal’s office, who then sent me home because I was inappropriately dressed. (What times those were, when you think back on it!) My father grumbled about the way I dressed, which he found ridiculous (there was no equivalent in his world, certainly not at the factory where he worked). My mother, who shared his view, calmed him down by saying, ‘It’s what’s in fashion in the schools,’ which, of course, made no sense. I must have been thirteen or fourteen. This was shortly before I turned into a Trotskyist activist and an aspiring intellectual, which involved a radical change in the way I dressed and acted: long hair, corduroys, turtlenecks, a duffle coat, Clarks sun boots . . . My parents found this just as difficult to understand, but at least it was less colourful. And it did correspond better with ‘lycée fashion’ – much more so with what was fashionable in universities; the students I was spending time with in my political activities all wore the same thing.

The litany of memories was doubtless, for my mother, the best – and perhaps the only way – for her to maintain an emotional connection with me: ‘When you were little . . .’; ‘When you were fourteen . . .’ and so on. How these memories must have been going round in her head in silence during the long years I was absent! She was first and foremost trying to re-establish the moments in which we had lived together. We had twenty years of life in common before I left home, but even that history we hadn’t experienced, or at least perceived, in the same way. What she had been able to see of my life, from the time I was fourteen or fifteen, remained for the most part exterior to what it was becoming, at least for me; her version of my life was one I moved further away from day by day. She knew about my political activism, which took up large amounts of my time from the age of sixteen. The least one could say is that she wasn’t particularly happy about it: in her eyes it was a distraction from the attention my studies required, and it could only lead to trouble. But she did not know what I was doing in any detail. My father was called in by the principal at the lycée, who filled him in and warned him about the consequences that could result – suspension or expulsion from the school, for example, and, almost certainly, a negative evaluation in my file, which would be an issue if I wished to enrol in preparatory classes for the grandes écoles after the baccalaureate, so I could take the entrance exam for the École normale supérieure. This was a meaningless threat, since neither my father nor I knew what he was talking about. Still, it provoked quite a crisis. Due to some sort of gender divide, my father only said a sentence or two about it to me. My mother took on the task of expressing their shared anger. ‘We don’t pay for you to go to school so you can sing the International in the lycée courtyard,’ she shouted at me that evening, adding numerous curses and threats: ‘You’re going to quit school and get a job.’ They couldn’t understand it: here I was with the good fortune to pursue a secondary education, a chance they had never had, and instead of being serious about my studies I was spending my time on all these other things. It left them altogether indignant.

As for the evenings and nights I spent in gay cruising areas starting at the age of seventeen, my mother knew nothing about them . . . My nightlife was a secret life, one I hid from everyone to avoid the opprobrium that fell on anyone who was discovered – or unmasked, you could say – with all the insults and cruel jokes that necessarily followed. Everyone struggled to protect themselves from this. Once, during a lively shouting match between a group of Trotskyists and Communists in the halls of the university, one of the latter hurled ‘You faggot!’ at me – it was a typical way of tarnishing someone, particularly a political adversary. A series of violent replies came back from the group I was with: ‘Stalinist cop!’ ‘Uptight priest!’ ‘Reactionary pig!’ ‘Fascist!’ and so on. A few days later, I noticed that same person out cruising: insulting others was a way of making his friends believe he wasn’t gay, even if they would never have suspected that he was. As for me, I stopped hiding my sexuality at the age of nineteen, or at least I was open about it with those close to me (which meant at that moment my Trotskyist comrades in the Ligue communiste). It never crossed my mind to come out to my family. I no longer hid who I was, and made no attempt to conceal anything from them, but given that I was seeing them less and less, and soon not at all, I didn’t bother going out of my way to tell them about the life I led, and would go on leading. I refused to think of homosexuality as an anomaly that needed to be disclosed to the family; I’d let them figure it out for themselves, and told myself that if they hadn’t worked it out already, too bad for them.

But then from my side of things, what did I really know of my mother’s life? Of the work she did, which she seldom mentioned, or of her feelings and desires, about which she said even less? When I was seventeen or eighteen I spent a month of summer vacation working in the same factory where she had been for a while, a place that would remain the exhausting setting of her days for nearly two decades more. I was able then to witness what working life was like for women in the factories. At the time, I didn’t speak to her about my own life and didn’t ask her any questions about hers. She showed no inclination to discuss it herself. When she left work, she preferred to leave the world of the factory behind, forgetting it until she had to go back the next day. How little one knows, really, about one’s parents. I didn’t know much about her life in the present, except for the time she spent at home, and I knew even less about her earlier life, by which I mean the life she led before getting married and having children. (I could say the same thing about my father.)

Given that she knew almost nothing about me and my activities once I had left home and was living far from her, far from them, she always seemed to focus on the period when we still lived together, my childhood and my adolescence. When we chatted over coffee in her house in Muizon – once I started spending time with her again after my long absence – she insisted on recalling, even though it annoyed me, things I used to say and attitudes I’d had, mostly from when I was twelve or thirteen or fourteen, sometimes younger, back during the time when we still communicated. Her insistence prevented me from forgetting all those aspects of that distant past; she brought them back to me with the stories she told about me, or rather, about me and her.

There is a way in which my mother embodied what Louis Aragon calls the ‘power to blackmail’, a power that insinuates itself into the act of recalling gestures or words from the past. She had a kind of hold on me: here is what you said back then, here is what you were . . . And when I replied: ‘But no!’ or ‘What are you talking about?’, then she would insist, with a malicious or an indignant tone in her voice: ‘You’re not really going to try to deny it, are you?’ In reality, she was trying to go back, and to bring me back, at least in our minds, to a time when we still lived together, to a time before my departure and even before the distance and the disassociation that had preceded my departure.

Except when she was talking about my childhood, everything she described took place during the period where I began to change, which is to say no longer to resemble the other boys from my social milieu, no longer to resemble my older brother. What she was describing were the outlines – and the first steps – in the journey of a class renegade. She had no other label for this at the time than words like ‘eccentric’ or ‘lycée fashion’. When does a trajectory of upward mobility, either scholarly or social, begin? Where is the starting point in the trajectory of a class renegade? And how does the transformation manifest? It’s a change both produced and demanded by the educational system, if you mean to continue in it and avoid the elimination planned for people like you, but it’s also a transformation that you long for and cobble together as best you can – as it’s happening to you or as you are making it happen. What are the warning signs – and when and by whom are they perceived? There’s a clear connection between the boy of thirteen or fourteen, the one who wore an orange shirt and a purple tie, and the one who at sixteen or seventeen was beginning to play the part of a young intellectual. Despite the evident break, the second is pursuing by other means the path begun by the first, even while he repudiates and reworks the original, gives him a more clearly defined appearance, one that makes more sense socially because it is built on models that are more real, and therefore more appealing.

How did my mother experience the distance I put between us? How did she experience my absence in her life (and, more fundamentally, that empty space between us that she was trying to fill when she came back to memories that, in her eyes, we were supposed to share)? What is it like for working-class parents to live through the rising social trajectories of their children which, in different manners and to different degrees, but nearly inevitably, establish a distance between the generation that lacked schooling (or had only a little) and the one that underwent (or is undergoing) that schooling? The difference in the amount of time spent within the educational system (a shorter time for the first group, a longer time for the second) constitutes one of the most powerful factors of the discordance, the disagreement, the ‘conflict’, the mutual ‘misunderstanding’ that is set up between parents and their children. Psychoanalytic interpretation has long sought to mask or minimise the social reasons for this – the sociological ones – but they are nonetheless obvious. It is crucial to set aside this psychologisation of social relations – even when it comes to the level of intrafamilial relations and the ways they evolve – in order to resituate them within the class structure.

With my mother gone, the continuity with my past that was maintained through her, even if tacitly, implicitly, is broken, or enormously loosened. Who else can still tell me anecdotes about the child I had been, and the adolescent I was in the process of becoming? Who can trace for me the map of my family, its genealogical tree? This very continuity that she did her utmost to remind me of and to rebuild was often uncomfortable for me. I had frequently found annoying her status as the privileged, if not the unique, witness of the person I had been at the moment when I began no longer to be what, socially speaking, I was. What, then, is the explanation for the nostalgia I began to feel for all of that, for my acute awareness that it was now absent? I had made a point of making that past disappear, erasing my family from my mind as much as I possibly could. And the past came back because of the strength of familial obligations – experienced as family feeling – when I had to take care of my mother. And now the archivist and historian of my youth is no longer there to tell the story.

Mother Homer Is Dead, the title of Hélène Cixous’s book about her mother’s death, is rich in implications. Now that the memorialist of her life, the cartographer of the branches of a family wiped out or dispersed by Nazism (who knew which members of the family were put to death, which succeeded in escaping and in establishing themselves in exile in different countries), now that this woman who could reconstruct the historical chronicle and genealogies of the characters who inhabited this story is gone . . . now that this Homer of a mother is gone, and this simultaneously political and personal Iliad is interrupted, how is her daughter to imagine her life, her past, her present? What will she be able to write, if it is not to retrace again and again this German genealogy, her family history, that of her mother and also her own?

My own family history is less tragic, of course, yet I could nonetheless borrow the title of Cixous’s magnificent book in order to understand what happens in someone’s life when their mother dies: Mother Homer Is Dead. And I must now speak of her so that she may live again.

Photograph © Guy Le Querrec / Magnum Photos, Inside a school, Brittany, Saint-Brieuc, March 1973