A French Reproach to Our Big, Baggy American Memoirs

One day the French writer Colombe Schneck, a total stranger, came to my house. She was a friend of a friend who lived in Paris, and it had somehow been arranged that she would drop by. The afternoon was gray and drizzly, and I felt slightly awkward about having this visitor I had never met coming to my house. But then she walked in, brisk, at ease. I liked her immediately. We launched right into big subjects; there was no chatter or small talk. In her frank, spare style, with its transporting particulars, she told me an anecdote about a reluctant visit she had made to a writer acquaintance’s death bed in a Paris hospital that might have been the best story anyone has ever told me. It somehow straightened and reordered something inside me. Even though I am a writing professor, I had forgotten the power of stories to do this.

Of course, I was curious about whether Schneck’s writing would have the same vividness and force as the story she had told me, and this spring, her books are appearing in English for the first time. Three of her slender volumes are collected together as Swimming in Paris: A Life in Three Stories. In them, she writes about growing up in an intellectual, bourgeois Parisian milieu and an abortion she had as a teenager that shook her feeling of invincibility; a close childhood friend who died of cancer in her early 50s; and swimming and dating postdivorce.

Schneck’s writing is sinewy, tough, sharp. The memoir comes out of a distinctly French tradition that includes writers such as Françoise Sagan, Marguerite Duras, and Annie Ernaux. This is a tradition of lean prose; the sentences are evocative, stylish, direct. In stripping away excess self-reflection, these books give us the bones of the story. They rely on rich, suggestive detail rather than prolonged passages of introspection.

Their rigorously frank narrators spare no one, not even themselves. They are bracing and refreshing, almost impatient with the comforting delusions most of us traffic in. When Schneck’s friend is dying in one story, she writes, “There is no such thing as empathy, no one can put themself in her place or take on even a little of her pain.” There is in Schneck’s books, as in Annie Ernaux’s, an utter refusal of sentimentality. Instead, there is an honest, intelligent, cool assessment of things.

In the new trilogy, Schneck often turns her razor critiques on her own behavior. In one section she even writes about herself in the third person as “Colombe,” as if to emphasize the analytic distance from her own experience. The books have no interest in the glorification or valorization of the self. Though Schneck wrestles with the difficulty of women’s experience, the obstacles and inequities it entails, the narrator is not presented as a consummate victim.

She begins, “My childhood was utopian. I was not a girl, I did not have a girl’s body, I was just me, Colombe: irascible, determined, stubborn, violent, brutal, clumsy, thieving, lying, mistreating my dolls and spinning stories about them, bad at school unless the subject intrigued me.”

One of my students recently sent me a quote from a writer named John Paul Brammer: “Many personal essays have little more to say than … why would this happen to me, a delicate newborn foal wobbling so blamelessly through life?” Schneck is very adamantly not in the newborn-foal school of memoir writing. She rejects the narrative of personal innocence that many writers are infatuated with. As her friend is dying, Schneck is suffering from a breakup, and she writes, “Colombe wanted to die, but then she is ashamed of thinking such a thing.”

In the section on her friend, she exposes her snobbisms, her jealousies, her lies, her competitive feelings, and other unsavory impulses. She reports a time when a cameraman at the television station where she works tells her that his father is a mailman. “Colombe laughs, it’s the first time she has met a mailman’s son. This laugh is one of her greatest embarrassments, one of her biggest regrets. She would like to erase it.”

The story about her friend, whom she calls “Héloïse,” is the most striking in the collection—a meditation on a friendship that began in childhood. As she puts it, “Whenever they speak they might be eleven or they might be forty-nine.” They go to the same liberal private school, vacation together in Saint-Tropez, each get married, have children and jobs, get divorced, have love affairs, and then her friend gets cancer. Héloïse is, Schneck writes, “one of the great witnesses of my life.”

In one of the book’s whimsical moments, Schneck invents a fictional sociologist from a working-class background who analyzes the two girls’ bourgeois upbringing. She drops in throughout the story to do a little sociological observation: “The imaginary sociologist, who has not retired, pops her head in. She is disappointed, she had hoped that Héloïse and Colombe, given their education, their degrees, their background, their friends, would have escaped their condition as women, wives, mothers.”

In this portrait of a friendship, Schneck captures the competitive jostling, the way love accrues over years, the deep, almost wordless connection between the old friends. She gets at the reassurance that only they can provide for each other. After being fired and divorcing her husband, Colombe finally confesses,

–I can’t take it anymore, it’s too hard.
Héloïse said:
–I’m on my way.
She met up with Colombe and the two went for a walk. Heather, ferns, birches, oaks.
–You can’t fight the whole world, Colombe. Pick the battles that matter, and let the rest go. Take care of your children. You have to work and earn money. The rest is not important.
Colombe, who is not accustomed to obeying, obeys her …
Later, Colombe will love telling Héloïse what she owes her: the right to be a little bit imperfect.

Toward the end of Heloise’s life, a painful dinner ensues where, over oysters, Héloïse wants to talk about dying, but Colombe can’t allow them to have that conversation. She also describes a moment when she runs back to Héloïse’s house to get a phone charger while Héloïse, very near the end of her life, is getting chemotherapy. Finding the charger in the bathroom, Colombe compares her friend’s fancy face cream with her own drugstore brand and can’t resist dipping her finger into it and putting it on her face.

Schneck writes of her friend’s death: “So Colombe perseveres in writing this story, knowing that writing is no consolation, nor reading either; yet suddenly a sentence can create a slight disruption in the order of things, and it is this disruption that allows her to carry on, before it is her turn to die.”

[Read: The year I tore through Annie Ernaux’s books]

In some sense, this memoir is for people who are the tiniest bit tired of memoir. It gives one the feeling of greater understanding, a sudden, expansive view from the top of a hill. Even though Schneck works at a scale that is deliberately small, insistently concrete, and extremely lean, her writing somehow exposes whole vistas of the female experience.

In Schneck’s books, no fattiness exists, no unnecessary flourish, no therapist’s-office stuff, no prettifying, no false reaching for redemption or uplift. Schneck’s charm is in her directness—one could say bluntness—her eye for vivid specifics, her cutting through to the significant. The brevity is in a sense a reproach to our big, baggy American memoirs, our excessive self-regard, our sheer wordiness on the subject of ourselves.

One wishes the American publisher had been bold enough to release each of the skinny books separately, as they appeared in the original French, but the pressure of the marketplace must have made this seem too daunting. To me, the tininess of the books is uniquely satisfying. It is both their pleasure and their mystery: how compact they are, how the straightforward, unassuming form opens up to deep reservoirs of feeling. The smallness is the power of these volumes; the deceptive simplicity is the allure.