Returning to Reims Author:Didier Eribon, Michael Lucey (Translator) A memoir and a meditation on individual and class identity, and the forces that keep us locked in political closets. — "On thinking the matter through, it doesn't seem exaggerated to assert that my coming out of the sexual closet, my desire to assume and assert my homosexuality, coincided within my personal trajectory with my shutting my... more »self up inside what I might call a class closet."
"There was a question that had come to trouble me a bit earlier, once I had taken the first steps on this return journey to Reims... Why, when I have had such an intense experience of forms of shame related to class ... why had it never occurred to me to take up this problem in a book?"
Returning to Reims is a breathtaking account of one man's return to the town where he grew up after an absence of thirty years. It is a frank, fearlessly personal story of family, memory, identity and time lost. But it is also a sociologist's view of what itmeans to grow up working class and then leave that class; of inequality and shifting political allegiances in an increasingly divided nation. « less