A Little Book Blew My Mind

I nearly didn’t read this. I wasn’t taken by the first couple of pages–a woman in her sixties begins writing her memoirs knowing that she’s nearing the end of her life. Hmm, I’m in my sixties, maybe this isn’t for me right now, might be depressing. I left it, read something else, but then came back to it, and was hooked.

If I say what the book is about it’ll be misleading, and yet I can’t say much more than the premise, because I’d give too much away. Forty women are trapped in a cage. They remember the world before, but among them is a child that somehow ended up with them, and she has no memory of anything prior.

The woman writing the memoir was that child, and she begins with writing about her adolescence and an awakening of sexuality and consciousness as she stares at a young guard.

But the story is about what it means to be human, who and what we are in essence. If you strip everything away–family, money, jobs, entertainment, acquiring what we need and want, aspiration, even any sense of where you are–and replace it with sterility and monotony, who would we be? What would make us live? That sounds dour and boring; it is anything but!

I couldn’t put this book down. I was reading while brushing my teeth, like I used to when I was a kid and read constantly, even while walking to school.

The author, Jacqueline Harpman, was born in 1929 in Belgium. Her father was Jewish, and in 1939, her family fled to Morocco and spent the war years in Casablanca. (There are echoes in this novel of the confinement and losses that they survived by escaping the country.) She wrote four novels in the late 1950s to mid 1960s, and then nothing for twenty years. During those years of literary silence, Harpman became a psychoanalyst. In 1987, she published a new novel and continued quite prolifically until her death in 2012. I Who Have Never Known Men was published initially in 1995, translated two years later, and re-issued, making a splash in 2022.

I keep thinking about the story and turning it over in my mind. I read the Afterward by the translator twice because I want to know what other people think about this book. The translator, Ros Schwartz, reads it as a tribute to the value of the ordinary, but I think it goes beyond that as even the ordinary is cut off from the experience of the narrator. Yet there is love, tenderness, compassion, thought, questioning, curiosity.

I underlined many passages I can’t quote because it would give too much away, but I can share this:

I was perfectly aware that I had only added another question to all the others, but it was a new one, and, in the absurd world in which I lived, and still live, that was happiness.

I Who Have Never Known Men

And this:

The briefest conversation creates time. Perhaps I have tried to create time through writing these pages. The reader and I thus mingled will constitute something living…because my story, added to their mind, will then become part of their thinking.

I Who Have Never Known Men