For a few days, people had been inviting me to watch Retour à Reims (Fragments)  — a new documentary inspired by Didier Eribon’s memoir about growing up in a working-class family in postwar France, and his escape from this background.

To be honest, I’d been avoiding it; my relationship with Eribon’s work is rather complex.  When I first read his Returning to Reims, I found myself sucked into its pages, besieged by flashbacks of my own childhood. But what kept me at a distance from Eribon’s memoir was my personal trajectory: in my case, my studies weren’t a factor for social mobility. After my graduation, I didn’t do any PhDs, and I didn’t enter the intellectual middle class. Instead, I went to work in kitchens for ten years — although I did also get to clean up horseshit in luxury resorts.

I wasn’t a class defector, and the bourgeoisie had steered well clear of welcoming me into its embrace (indeed, it was only too happy to exploit me). Sure, I’d left my Livorno hometown, with its fading old blast furnace and its soaring unemployment. But I’d remained in the working class, jumping from the frying pan into the fire. When I finally tried to write my story, the Daily Mail described me as a “sweary, grizzled old Italian Lefty,” with the implication that people like me shouldn’t write books but stick to cleaning toilets and cooking pizzas.