"Often I have made love to force myself to write I hoped that orgasm, the most violent end to waiting that can be, would make me feel certain that there is no greater pleasure than writing a book. In other words, she is keen to break her writer's block."
"The Young Man is Ernaux's shortest memoir yet, clocking just over half an hour in audio. But brevity doesn't impede her ability to get to the heart of the intimate dynamics or external pressures of a situation that many others view as taboo. The couple get disapproving looks in restaurants, which, rather than leaving Ernaux cowed, reinforces her determination not to hide my affair with a man who could have been my son."
"Tavia Gilbert is the narrator whose reading, though a little mannered at times, underscores the distance Ernaux puts between herself and her lover, allowing her to observe him from the vantage point of middle age and from a different economic and social strata. He tore me away from my generation but I was not part of his, she notes. By the time they break up, near the turn of the millennium, the book that she had been struggling with two years prior is magically complete."
A middle-aged woman begins a sexual relationship with a man thirty years her junior to try to break a creative block, hoping orgasm will catalyze certainty about creative pleasure. The affair unexpectedly becomes an intense relationship that both attempt to push toward extremes without fully grasping the meaning. Public disapproval in restaurants and social settings reinforces her refusal to hide the liaison. A narrated audio performance emphasizes generational, economic, and social distance, enabling observation from middle age. The relationship ends near the turn of the millennium, and the previously stalled creative project is completed.
Read at www.theguardian.com
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