THE OTHER GIRL

Ghost story.

Invited to contribute to a collection of imagined letters, Nobel Prize winner Ernaux addresses the sister she never knew. She was 10 when she overheard her mother disclose to a friend that Annie was not her first child. There had been another daughter, who died of diphtheria in 1938 when she was 6. “She died like a little saint,” her mother said. And “she was nicer than the other one.” The other one being the daughter born two years later: Annie. The idea of her dead sister haunted Ernaux throughout her childhood and haunts her still. Growing up, she never asked her parents, relatives, or family friends about the girl, whose name, she learned, was Ginette. She saw no photos of her until, when she was 18, she found a cache hidden in the attic, in a box accidentally left open. Because her parents were clear that they wanted only one child, she understood that her existence had depended on her sister’s death. “I was aware of my advantages as an only child,” she admits, “a child born after the death of another, the pampered object of a worried solicitude.” She had been a delicate child, and when she was 5, a cut from a rusty nail gave her tetanus. Her mother, frantic, dosed her with water from Lourdes. “I had to come to terms with this mysterious contradiction,” she reflected later: “you, the good girl, the little saint, were not saved, and I, the demon, survived. Not only survived, was miraculously saved.” Ernaux sees her letter to Ginette, then, as a way to “repay an imaginary debt by giving you, in turn, the existence your death gave me”—or to exorcise a spirit.

A moving reflection on a profound loss.