The Life, Old Age and Death of a Working-Class Woman review – a son confronts his mother’s decline

Didier Eribon’s guilt and shame fuels an angry and eloquent meditation on our attitudes towards the elderly and the end of life

“My mother,” writes Didier Eribon, “was unhappy her whole life.” Abandoned as a child, she started work at 14 as a house servant, later becoming a cleaning lady and then worked for decades making glassware at a factory in France’s Champagne region.

Married at 20, she shared a bed for 55 years with a violent, philandering and controlling man she did not love, ultimately bearing intimate witness to his Alzheimer’s disease and death. A decade later, in her mid-80s, her sons put this cognitively and physically enfeebled woman into a state-run nursing home, whose French name – établissement d’hébergement pour personnes âgées dépendantes – makes it sound nicer than it was.