The Other Girl by Annie Ernaux Review: A Sister Made of Silence

Part of: The Deep Reader

All articles on Annie Ernaux

The only story Annie Ernaux ever heard her mother tell about her dead sister closes with a comparison: Ginette “was nicer than the other one.” With that judgment, the child who died before Ernaux's birth is raised into a little saint, while the living child is reduced to an unnamed remainder. Ernaux answers by identifying the unnamed child: “The other one is me.”

From that summer afternoon onward, Ginette occupies a decisive place between daughter and parents despite having no recoverable voice, no shared memories with Annie, and scarcely any surviving history beyond six photographs, civil records, and other people's recollections.

Ernaux leaves her sister's inner life blank. She studies what can still be known: the words that made Ginette a saint, the objects that passed from the dead child to the living one, the silence maintained for decades, and the guilty mythology the survivor built around her own existence. The family relation sharpens around an absence the book refuses to fill.

One Comparison Reorders the Family

The mother tells the story in fragments: Ginette's throat closed with diphtheritic membranes; her father lost his mind when he found her dead; the child announced that she was going to see the Virgin Mary and Jesus. Throughout the sequence, the repeated phrase “she says” keeps the mother's voice in command until the account culminates in the judgment that Ginette was nicer, identifying Annie as “the other one.”

In the word nicer, comparison does the damage. Nice could describe an affectionate child, a well-behaved child, or one pleasing to God; Ernaux patiently recovers all three meanings from the language of her childhood. The comparative establishes the harsher relation of a scale: Ginette becomes the measure of goodness, although the narrator never knew her, while Annie discovers that being the only visible child did not make her the only child held in her parents' minds.

Before that sentence, ordinary reprimands had not threatened her confidence. Her parents called her greedy, bold, scruffy, a know-it-all, even a child with the devil in her, and she remained certain of their love. After learning about Ginette, Ernaux rereads those reprimands against the flawless standard death has made possible. Jealousy forms part of a larger displacement: the comparison assigns the living daughter a family role—difficult, worldly, intellectually proud, morally inferior, and alive.

The short sentence “The other one is me” performs the demotion without decorating the injury or explaining it away: Annie's name disappears at the moment she learns that Ginette's has been concealed.

A Saint Has No Childhood

Ginette first exists for Annie inside a completed story: she dies piously, on Holy Thursday, and the date is later preserved on her gravestone as though it confirmed divine election. Her goodness admits no quarrels, selfishness, mischief, boredom, or ordinary childish cruelty. Ernaux observes that Ginette has none of the traits of a real child; like a saint, she has no childhood.

Beside this single story, Ernaux places another that the mother told repeatedly. At five, Annie nearly died from tetanus after injuring her knee on a rusty nail; doctors administered serum as her mother dribbled Lourdes water between the child's clenched teeth and later made a pilgrimage in gratitude. The surviving daughter acquires an expanding store of anecdotes; the dead one is compressed into sacred final words.

Placed together, the stories produce the narrator's private logic. The good daughter was denied a miracle; the supposedly demonic one received it. From there comes the thought that Ginette had to die so Annie could be born, survive, and eventually write. Ernaux records pride along with guilt, refusing the sentimentality expected from a surviving child, whose sister's death could make her feel chosen as easily as indebted.

At its most inflated, this logic yields the declaration, “You died so I would write,” briefly turning the tragedy into the author's origin story. Ernaux is partly enthralled by that grandeur even as she places an epidemic, the timing of compulsory vaccination, and chance against it. Her later admission that she chose not to question relatives who had known Ginette places the writer inside the family silence: she helped preserve the dead child as “Dead and pure. A myth.”

Ginette's Things Came Before Her Name

No one needed to pronounce Ginette's name for her possessions to structure Annie's childhood. The younger girl slept until about seven in her sister's rosewood cot, then carried Ginette's brown Morocco leather briefcase to school, struggling with compartments that spilled her notebooks unless she opened them in one sharp movement. For years she assumed the bag had been bought in advance for her.

The cot and briefcase give Ginette a material afterlife. Household economy may explain their reuse; Annie's later knowledge changes what that reuse means, since the living child slept in the dead child's bed and went to school with the dead child's bag. Because her parents withheld the history attached to them, the secret persisted inside daily routine, illegible to the child living among its evidence.

Even after Annie learns Ginette's name from a cousin, finds the family record book in a strongbox, and knows where the grave is, she and her parents continue as though she knows nothing. When her father's coffin is lowered beside Ginette's, mother and daughter treat the neighboring grave as invisible; the following year, Annie brings flowers for her father and leaves her sister's grave untouched because her mother has never acknowledged it to her.

Ernaux calls what she inherited both a story and a law of silence. The silence kept the dead daughter beyond questioning and preserved a grief belonging to the years before Annie; it also kept Ginette from being openly offered as the better daughter. Annie, for her part, did not want them to speak and hoped, however obscurely, that time might weaken the dead girl's place inside them.

During a medical examination in 1983, Ernaux's mother can no longer remember her own birth year, yet she says, “I had two daughters” and supplies 1938, the year Ginette died. Ernaux's father, welcoming his first grandson, cries, “The little girl has arrived!” The secret persists in speech after decades of silence.

The Trap Inside “You”

The Other Girl addresses Ginette as “you,” although the pronoun never settles into easy intimacy. Ernaux cannot write “our mother” or “our parents” because the sisters lived under different versions of those people: young workers building a business before the war in Ginette's years, older parents marked by war and bereavement in Annie's. Biology supplies a shared family; experience denies them a shared possessive.

Ernaux comes to distrust the address: “you” risks inventing a closeness the sisters never possessed and assigning Ginette responsibility for Annie's character, fears, ambition, and writing. She states the danger with exceptional economy: “The ‘you’ is a trap.”

Six photographs survived, and relatives who remembered Ginette could have supplied fragments of her history, but Ernaux admits that she let those witnesses die without questioning them. Ginette's life has passed beyond recovery; the letter follows the mark made by the family story.

Restraint keeps Ginette from becoming a convenient fictional character. When a cousin remarks that the child in one photograph does not look as if she likes herself, Ernaux wonders for the first time whether Ginette was happy, permitting the question while withholding the answer. A lowered head or guarded expression can disturb the saintly legend; it cannot disclose a dead child's consciousness.

A photograph supplies posture, a grave a date, the record book legal kinship, and a remembered phrase family rank. Together they dismantle the identities imposed on Ginette—the saint, the rival, and the secret double—leaving the “empty form” Ernaux refuses to fill.

The Other Girl Who Escaped

A 1937 photograph from Le Havre opens the final chapter. Ginette stands in white before a wall pasted with demands about food prices, wages, paid holidays, and the forty-hour week; her fingers touch at the tips, her face is serious, and the industrial district behind her is visible. Ernaux can now place the child inside a working-class world she herself partly remembers. For one paragraph, Ginette loses the radiance and menace imposed on her by the family story and becomes a five-year-old with one year left to live.

The photograph offers a body, a date, and a social setting without pretending to reveal Ginette's inner life. Ernaux cannot insert her sister into memories of their parents or exchange one childhood for the other. The girls inherited some of the same songs and family language and were born to the same mother at different times, but they never formed the “we” that the letter's intimacy appears to promise.

“The other girl is me,” Ernaux writes near the end, adding that she is the one who fled the family and went elsewhere. At ten, “the other one” meant the child found inferior to a dead saint; in adulthood, otherness also names the surviving daughter's escape from the place, language, and future her parents inhabited. Ginette remains beside them in Normandy; Annie refuses to be buried there.

Ernaux knows that Ginette will never read the letter and that strangers are its actual recipients. Her faint hope that words may reach the dead echoes the summer story that reached the wrong child, but it claims no resurrection. The book can give Ginette neither the childhood her parents' silence left unrecorded nor a sisterly bond life never permitted.

At the grave, Ernaux may still have nothing to say; on the page, that nothing acquires form without a counterfeit voice.