#cleaned out

This novel is mostly autobiographical, like most of her work and the main character, Denise Lesur, seems to be a stand-in for the author. She tells about her abortion as a young woman and remembers her childhood and teenage years. Her story focuses mostly on her relationship with her parents and her social background and the growing discrepancy between that and her life as school and then as a student. Her tale is interwoven with her presents thoughts and one feeling dominates the whole novel : shame. Shame against her current situation, shame against her background, shame against her parents and shame against herself for despising her parents.

Her parents owned a small grocery store and a café and were a bit higher in society than the factory workers who used to come in the café. She enjoyed a great deal of freedom as a kid and spent her time eating everything she wanted (hygiene wasn’t a concern for young Denise) and making fun of the various patrons (often drunk men). She is then sent to a catholic school and is soon confronted with things she cannot understand and she wasn’t prepared for. What she was so proud of and happy as first she comes to despise and feeling ashamed of. She goes on her way to middle and high school, and finally university. Despite being a top student, she never truly belongs anywhere. Not with her family whom she finds now dirty, uneducated and rough, neither with her classmates who seems to have something that she doesn’t which she at first struggle to articulate. The abortion taking place at the current time is understood as the pinnacle of her shame which seems neverending.