The Erotics of Yogurt: On Annie Ernaux’s “Look at the Lights, My Love”
Annie Ernaux, transl. Alison L. Strayer | Look at the Lights, My Love | Yale University Press | 2023 | 96 Pages
***Reaching for an apple
I have always dreamed of falling in love at the grocery store, the two of us reaching for the same apple under the fluorescent lights as irrigation quenches iceberg lettuce. Surrounded by bright colors, our fingers would be wrapped around the elemental red of temptation. What happens, though, when the search for love is over?
When I was young I lived in the suburbs of Indianapolis. There was little to do other than walk around the patch of woods behind my house or down the hill to Kroger. Kroger, which some people incorrectly refer to as “Kroger’s” or “the Kroger’s,” is a large chain of national stores also known as Safeway or Albertson’s. Now that I live on the East Coast, I almost never hear the name uttered at all. Only occasionally did we go to Meijer’s and my grandma detested Marsh. But back then, I went to Kroger almost every day.
I’ve had my struggles with grocery stores. At the beginning of the pandemic, I could barely leave my apartment. I listened to the sirens in Red Hook and ate carrots, beans, and rice. It took a few months before I could enter the grocery store on my own. I had to ask friends for help. I was in the depths of an eating disorder and an intense exercise routine meant to get revenge on an ex who broke my heart. Food and love are, of course, inseparable.
***Bovary’s little sister
In Look at the Lights, My Love, translated into English by Alison L. Strayer, Annie Ernaux ponders the supermarket. Seasons and capitalism collide in our shared cultural space. The au pair who stole sweets and alternated between bulimia and anorexia in Ernaux’s A Girl’s Story returns, but now she abides by the law and exits through the checkout. Yogurt is a necessity now, not a magic diet pill. The big box store is a little errand to ward off the fraying edges of existentialism.
Since winning the Nobel Prize in October, Annie Ernaux has had such a big year that Seven Stories Press made merch with her name on it in a Death Metal font, and meme accounts like katebush.420 regularly mention her as a signifier for longing. The author of over twenty books, Ernaux writes incisive, diaristic novels and novelistic diaries about her life, many of which hardly break one-hundred pages. Men, marriage, the history of France, Alzheimer’s, mothers, and fathers all get the icy, fragmentary treatment.
Ernaux’s recent popularity in the US points to our desire for literature that plumbs sexuality without sentimentality. Do away with the crumbs of dissociative sex and give us something raw. Quick head, lounging in cum-stained underwear, the pain of waiting for a phone call, the empty church, and letting men become disposable all sound like the B plot of a Sex and the City episode. However, as Jaime Hood wrote in The Baffler, Ernaux is our reigning cum queen. She chases loss beyond the limit, turning longing into an art. She reminds us desire is inextricably linked to the stark backdrop of capitalist alienation that always throws passion into sharp relief. Suffering is a holy high. As Ernaux writes in The Possession, originally published in 2002, “If my suffering seemed absurd to me—outrageous, even, when compared to others both physical and social—if it seemed a luxury, I still preferred it to certain calm and productive periods in my life.”
What comes for “Bovary’s little sister” after the end of love? What new masochism does she chase? In Look at the Lights, My Love, Ernaux settles on the journal as a structure, “the form most in keeping with [her] temperament.” From November 2012 to October 2013, she documents her fleeting impressions of an Auchan superstore in Cergy, France. At once a consideration of class, feminism, and food deserts, Look at the Lights, My Love captures the hyper-acceleration of capital. Like her previous journal of observation, Exteriors, originally published in 2000, most reflections are little more than a few pages long, like the thoughts they tell you to notice in a meditation class. But Ernaux doesn’t let her thoughts go; instead, she meticulously records them. Every store shelf elicits revelation. A Barbie driving a Volkswagen inspires a feminist uprising: “This is where you have to come, to places where our unconscious minds are shaped, and slash and burn all these objects of transmission.” Other times, Ernaux finds the supermarket to be peaceful, like a garden, a public space awash with a sense of interior privacy. You can carry on a conversation about your crush against the Evian. Enchanted, Ernaux signs up for a loyalty card. It’s free. She doesn’t even have to give her name.
Food, Ernaux knows, is both oppressive and sexual. A well-timed pizza can either speed along or derail the lover’s stroll to bed. Depending on love’s strength, we may “think that with a man at [our] side, all [our] my actions, no matter how insignificant—winding the alarm clock, fixing breakfast—will become charged with life, take on a weight that would let [us] stop floating, get a grip on the world.” Or alone we may crave “those tidbits of cheese and chocolate, those tastes of raw cookie dough keep my sense of hunger alive.”
For me, the elements of life, such as possession, organization, and food, are suffused with the erotic. The grocery-shopping housewife becomes another amuse-bouche. A little nibble of pussy, opened by the possibility of a man with the skill to remind a woman of her sinewy desire: to be fucked. The orgasm is the portal to the digestif. Even more masochistic than lite BDSM is the suffering of playing house with someone you know will never love you back. To consider suffering the highest tightrope is the only orgasm worth a damn. I played that game too well for too long.
***MILFy/Not MILFy
A friend recently informed me that some foods are MILFy and some foods are not MILFy.
MILFy: Yogurt, salmon, pasta salad, Branzino, White cheddar Cheez-Its, dark chocolate, boxed wine, Diet Coke.
Not MILFy: Carbs, pasta, hoagies, Coke, Alfredo, pizza, steak, Ranch dressing, most desserts with dairy.
It reminds me of Roland Barthes’s “J’aime, je n’aime pas…”
J’aime: salad, cinnamon, cheese, pimento, marzipan, beer, toast, cherries, unrefined salt.
Je n’aime pas: strawberries.
Barthes didn’t like women in slacks either. C'est comme ça.
In college I delighted in non-MILFy foods. I bought Stouffer’s meals and dollar pot pies and ate pots of instant mashed potatoes. I would stress eat Cosmic Brownies and drink Coke. I ate alone and without shame. I loved the Midwestern buffet—Chinese, cafeteria, any style would do. Eating was the bodily activity I knew best. At the time sex always felt like tuning a guitar. Never quite right, always bending, twisting, breaking, watching myself while trying to hit the right note.
When I started restricting my diet during the pandemic, I turned to one of Ernaux’s favorites: yogurt. There’s a reason the supermarket publicizes the little cups in pastel hues. There’s a reason IBS is touted as a woman’s affliction. Girls are not engaging in diet culture. Girls just have bad tummies.
***Tetris
The working woman, as Ernaux explores here and elsewhere, is subject to the tedium of food preparation—appalling in its enormity that flattens our identity, our ability to consider each bite. Instead, when one is forced to cook, one contends with goop. Pasta, potatoes, pounds of meat, all the same flabby opaque taupe. Beige feeds the family on time and under budget.
Much of Look at the Lights, My Love follows these gloomy working women. Ernaux watches them struggling to get the right ingredients into their cart before their children raise a ruckus. In a recent Le Monde article on the strikes for pensions, Ernaux dared to imagine a life beyond drudgery. “That is what is at stake today: the awareness that the state has rights over the lives of citizens and can postpone the moment when they are finally free to enjoy life as they please.”
Shopping is the distillation of thousands of chores. It is a delicate balancing act of budget, need, taste, and optimism. The poor have their own tax. Grocery shopping is like a game of Tetris with coupons, brands, and other limitations. Navigating aisles, children, and proportions, the store can be just as much a reminder of class as a menagerie of brie. A few days ago I looked at a box of Wheat Thins and discovered it was seven dollars. Fruit, even the non-organic kind, continues to rise in price. An IBS girlie in need of Greek yogurt will find the cost of living is rising faster than her wage.
The grocery store, like the world in general, is built for pairs. “Buying groceries as a couple for the first time confirms that a shared life is truly beginning. It means making adjustments for budgets and tastes, united around the basic need to eat,” Ernaux writes. Like her fellow countryman Édouard Louis, Ernaux is always curious about the way class informs our interpersonal mobility. How does love, both romantic and familial, whittle our ability to choose products at the grocery store? Ernaux, of course, can shop as haphazardly as possible. Her grocery bag is a strange mix of lady fingers, cat food, and Post-It notes. She no longer has a tradfam to shop for. She can be the observer and the observed.
***Dilemma
Ernaux’s notes work best when presented in her traditional “palimpsest” method:
WEDNESDAY, MAY 15
The death count from the collapse of Rana Plaza in Bangladesh is 1,127. Found in the rubble were brand labels for Carrefour, Camaïeu, and Auchan.
Early on in Ernaux’s journal, we begin to see a brewing “dilemma.” Ernaux wonders whether or not, and how often, to write phrases such as “a black woman” or “an African woman.” She fears whitening the women she encounters: “The white reader will, instinctively, imagine a white woman.” She decides to address this by writing about race when it suits her before moving on to the “island of loose Italia grapes.” In some ways, this makes sense, as she’s both naming a gap in her knowledge and discussing how to address it. On the other hand, it reads like an aside. By disclosing her bias, she attempts to re-integrate neutrality into the land of the supermarket.
The Auchan, a French chain that Ernaux frequents, seems to be a one-stop-shop for the non-white, working-class stretched thin by racial capitalism and empire. Where in The Years, originally published in 2008, Ernaux named bias, colonialism, and racism so specifically it felt like an indictment, in Look at the Lights, My Love, it seems like a passing thought—as one might expect a journal to record.
So I must ask, why is Ernaux so obsessed with burqas? She notices the women with headscarves. She ponders the women with headscarves. She wonders what their relationship to men is like when they come to the store alone and she wonders what their relationship to men is like when they come with their husbands.
Ernaux’s pity is decidedly maudlin. “I thought, for her to go to Auchan alone, what an ordeal it must have been, one that even all her veils could not make bearable,” she writes. At times she notes the “colonial picturesque” in her desire, or she questions how any of it is her business. But what does noting these things accomplish? While Ernaux talks to some employees or patrons, she never stops to ask these women what they think, only to marvel that in news articles, their voice is never present. Well.
***The book section
Ernaux often returns to Auchan’s book section in Look at the Lights, My Love. There she flees from the stress of writing or comes to reward herself for a job well done. “What else is there to do when you don’t write? Eat, drink, and make love,” she once marveled in Getting Lost. I did the same at Kroger. There was little to see in the Kroger book section. A few magazines, a few Nora Roberts paperbacks, and occasionally a tattered Stephen King novel. But I made do. When The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo came out, it was cause for celebration. Finally, something worth picking up at the supermarket. I wish there was a grocery store that sold Ernaux in the US so I could slide her onto the conveyor belt as she would like: “between a pound of butter and a pair of tights.”
I felt most at home in a grocery store when I wandered away from everyone else. Just for a few minutes. Enough time to wonder if I would meet someone just as lost as me, hoping to find some odd duck looking at paperbacks in the Indianapolis suburbs. Perhaps they would hogtie me and put an apple in my mouth.
*** “Love gives you the space”
Suffering is simple. Domestic bliss, actual bliss, is something else altogether. When you know who your next orgasm is coming from, love is no longer a game of danger. A therapist once told me that love is not dangerous. “Love is not about wondering when you will see the other next,” he told me. Ernaux may disagree. To her, waiting is the point of love. The grocery store is filler, the stakes are not the same as someone who must Tetris together enough food for the week. As the cost of living skyrockets and the energy to cook after working more dissipates, the store feels like an emotional rollercoaster. One that never gives me the thrill I want.
Desire can never be fulfilled. Orgasm is la petite mort because it foreshadows the ultimate end of love. I have stopped believing that love is agony. I believe, as Felix Gonzalez-Torres did in an interview about his late partner, that “love gives you the space and the place to do other work.”
Love is going to the grocery store for a snack—either with your lover or alone—considering what sweet treat they may want the next time they are over.