Eribon’s account is hardly a condemnation of the French provincial working class. While he recounts a vexed relationship with his family and his own past, he recognizes—and critiques—the social and political forces that organize and limit individuals and groups through class stratification. But what is striking about his memoir—striking most of all to him, it seems—is how long it has taken him to recognize the importance of class to his own identity: “Let me put it this way: it turned out to be much easier for me to write about shame linked to sexuality than about shame linked to class” (25).

In so many ways, I understand precisely the emotional terrain Eribon writes about, having stumbled through it myself. He describes a woundedness, a sense of shame, a feeling of not belonging in the Parisian circles he eventually started living and working in, and I feel in my own flesh that what he is talking about is just as much a product of class origins as of sexuality. Like Eribon, I was not supposed to study English in college, much less to spend so much time reading and writing. I remember being eleven, sitting in a McDonald’s in Biloxi, where we’d gone on a cheap family vacation, reading one of C. S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia, one of the first full-length books I read, and my father telling me, “Stop reading. No one reads on vacation.” At best, my parents thought I would teach English at the local high school; they could understand that—an allowable profession for a bookish kid. My decision to go to graduate school left them initially speechless, even angry; I was becoming something they couldn’t comprehend. While I knew more and more what I wanted to do, I still inherited a part of their incomprehension, their sense flowing through my veins that I was stepping out of the right order of things. Like Eribon, to this day, despite professional security and accomplishments, I feel that somehow I could lose it all because I will be discovered as someone who doesn’t belong, someone who got in by mistake.