The Greatest Love Is Grieving
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The Weekend Read
/ March 7, 2026
The Greatest Love Is Grieving
I spent years as a labor organizer. Marguerite Duras’s war novel taught me that the strongest fighters are always the women hurting the most.
Haley Mlotek
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Women wait to undergo a medical check in Paris in October 1944.
(AFP / Getty Images)
The most militant people I’ve ever met have been women in mourning. They grieve in anger and with purpose. Women in mourning know that there are no times of peace; no reprieves from suffering. There are only the times when they’re expected to behave as though they believe peace to be possible even if there is demonstrable proof of the opposite.
This is something I have always known to be true, but was only brought to the forefront of my mind after reading The War, by Marguerite Duras, which she published in 1985, 40 years after the end of World War II. This book, billed as a memoir, might actually be better described as a collection of found texts: six stories told across three chapters, all of them in some way about Duras’s life towards the end of World War II, some of them presented as true and some as fiction.
It is in the book’s first section where mourning is written as a feeling that reshapes one’s world and worldview. According to Duras, these first pages are a diary of the days she spent waiting to find out if her husband, Robert Antelme, had survived after being arrested and deported to a concentration camp for being a member of the French Resistance. It is April of 1945 and news of the camps being liberated by Allies is trickling throughout Paris, but she has yet to receive any news about where Robert—“Robert L.”—might be, dead or alive.
Duras disowns the memoir before giving it to us. She claims to have found it in her home in Neuphle-le-Chateau, but with “no recollection of having written it.” The exercise books found in her blue cupboards are hers, she knows. She knows the people and places written in there; she recognizes her own handwriting. And yet, “I can’t see myself writing the diary. When would I have done so, in what year, at what times of day, in what house?” Even years later, she finds herself shaken by the contents of the book and the fact that she was capable of writing “this thing that I still can’t put a name to, and that appalls me when I reread it.” The handwriting she recognizes is “calm, extraordinarily even,” and the words confront her “with a tremendous chaos of thought and feeling.” There were earlier drafts of what became The War, where Duras apparently wrote that she knew everything one could know when one knows nothing. She wrote what we read when she was apart and alone from …
Be honest—this is ridiculous.
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Current Issue
The Weekend Read
/ March 7, 2026
The Greatest Love Is Grieving
I spent years as a labor organizer. Marguerite Duras’s war novel taught me that the strongest fighters are always the women hurting the most.
Haley Mlotek
Share
Copy Link
X (Twitter)
Bluesky Pocket
Ad Policy
Women wait to undergo a medical check in Paris in October 1944.
(AFP / Getty Images)
The most militant people I’ve ever met have been women in mourning. They grieve in anger and with purpose. Women in mourning know that there are no times of peace; no reprieves from suffering. There are only the times when they’re expected to behave as though they believe peace to be possible even if there is demonstrable proof of the opposite.
This is something I have always known to be true, but was only brought to the forefront of my mind after reading The War, by Marguerite Duras, which she published in 1985, 40 years after the end of World War II. This book, billed as a memoir, might actually be better described as a collection of found texts: six stories told across three chapters, all of them in some way about Duras’s life towards the end of World War II, some of them presented as true and some as fiction.
It is in the book’s first section where mourning is written as a feeling that reshapes one’s world and worldview. According to Duras, these first pages are a diary of the days she spent waiting to find out if her husband, Robert Antelme, had survived after being arrested and deported to a concentration camp for being a member of the French Resistance. It is April of 1945 and news of the camps being liberated by Allies is trickling throughout Paris, but she has yet to receive any news about where Robert—“Robert L.”—might be, dead or alive.
Duras disowns the memoir before giving it to us. She claims to have found it in her home in Neuphle-le-Chateau, but with “no recollection of having written it.” The exercise books found in her blue cupboards are hers, she knows. She knows the people and places written in there; she recognizes her own handwriting. And yet, “I can’t see myself writing the diary. When would I have done so, in what year, at what times of day, in what house?” Even years later, she finds herself shaken by the contents of the book and the fact that she was capable of writing “this thing that I still can’t put a name to, and that appalls me when I reread it.” The handwriting she recognizes is “calm, extraordinarily even,” and the words confront her “with a tremendous chaos of thought and feeling.” There were earlier drafts of what became The War, where Duras apparently wrote that she knew everything one could know when one knows nothing. She wrote what we read when she was apart and alone from …
The Greatest Love Is Grieving
Be honest—this is ridiculous.
Log In
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The Greatest Love Is Grieving
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Magazine
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Economy
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Current Issue
The Weekend Read
/ March 7, 2026
The Greatest Love Is Grieving
I spent years as a labor organizer. Marguerite Duras’s war novel taught me that the strongest fighters are always the women hurting the most.
Haley Mlotek
Share
Copy Link
Facebook
X (Twitter)
Bluesky Pocket
Email
Ad Policy
Women wait to undergo a medical check in Paris in October 1944.
(AFP / Getty Images)
The most militant people I’ve ever met have been women in mourning. They grieve in anger and with purpose. Women in mourning know that there are no times of peace; no reprieves from suffering. There are only the times when they’re expected to behave as though they believe peace to be possible even if there is demonstrable proof of the opposite.
This is something I have always known to be true, but was only brought to the forefront of my mind after reading The War, by Marguerite Duras, which she published in 1985, 40 years after the end of World War II. This book, billed as a memoir, might actually be better described as a collection of found texts: six stories told across three chapters, all of them in some way about Duras’s life towards the end of World War II, some of them presented as true and some as fiction.
It is in the book’s first section where mourning is written as a feeling that reshapes one’s world and worldview. According to Duras, these first pages are a diary of the days she spent waiting to find out if her husband, Robert Antelme, had survived after being arrested and deported to a concentration camp for being a member of the French Resistance. It is April of 1945 and news of the camps being liberated by Allies is trickling throughout Paris, but she has yet to receive any news about where Robert—“Robert L.”—might be, dead or alive.
Duras disowns the memoir before giving it to us. She claims to have found it in her home in Neuphle-le-Chateau, but with “no recollection of having written it.” The exercise books found in her blue cupboards are hers, she knows. She knows the people and places written in there; she recognizes her own handwriting. And yet, “I can’t see myself writing the diary. When would I have done so, in what year, at what times of day, in what house?” Even years later, she finds herself shaken by the contents of the book and the fact that she was capable of writing “this thing that I still can’t put a name to, and that appalls me when I reread it.” The handwriting she recognizes is “calm, extraordinarily even,” and the words confront her “with a tremendous chaos of thought and feeling.” There were earlier drafts of what became The War, where Duras apparently wrote that she knew everything one could know when one knows nothing. She wrote what we read when she was apart and alone from …
