“Slow Death” and Caring about Eating Disorders Across the Life Course: Re-Reading Annie Ernaux with Lauren Berlant’

Throughout her long career, Annie Ernaux has returned insistently to the enduring impact of childhood trauma, consumer culture, ‘class defection’, abortion, cancer, love affairs, menopause and aging. However, at the age of 75, A Girl’s Story (2016) introduces a ‘perpetually missing link’, identified by critics as sexual abuse precipitating a two-year eating disorder and amenorrhea. Although narrated as ‘contained between two temporal boundaries related to food and blood’, Ernaux’s description of the girl who ‘does not know that she has succumbed to the saddest of all passions, the passion for food’ recalls what Lauren Berlant describes as the ‘slow death’ of obesity in precarious neoliberal subjects (2007): unending striving, simultaneously sustaining and life-threatening. To counter ageist biomedical narratives which neglect the ‘slow death’ of unacknowledged eating disorders in later life, this article harnesses Berlant and critical engagement with scientific literature to re-read A Girl’s Story’s astounding evocations of restriction/binge cycles and their echoes across Ernaux’s work. This involves a productive challenge to Ernaux’s unwitting perpetuation of the inaccurate ‘SWAG’ stereotype of the skinny white adolescent girl. At least 18% of EDs diagnosed are in older women, most–notably in over-60s–with OSFED (other specified feeding and eating disorder: the most accurate diagnostic label for what Ernaux describes), often chronic or (re)developed or worsened by (peri)menopause. Only 6% are underweight and anorexia and bulimia are minority diagnoses. Aetiologies of EDs remain unknown, amenorrhea is no longer a diagnostic criterion, and eating disorder recovery is only 50%. Yet although Ernaux sees recovery as weight-restored resumption of menstruation, the affective urgency of her representations of disordered eating in A Girl’s Story suggests enduring impacts trackable across her work. The aim here is not to pathologize, but, instead, to re-read Ernaux with Berlant in the light of overlooked scientific research to identify how Ernaux’s narration of a ‘transpersonal self’ continues to raise important questions about unacknowledged collective experiences: the systemically produced and neglected striving of women aging with EDs.