what she wanted was a pair of ears

She spoke to me a lot, in long monologues; (...). All she wanted was a pair of ears listening to her, and she ignored anything I said. (...)

I don't know if she was lying, if she was suffering. But why else reapeat it so often, like some kind of justification? (...)

I came to understand that many different modes of discourse intersected in my mother and spoke through her, that she was constantly torn between her shame at not having finished school and her pride that even so, she'd made it through and had a bunch of beautiful kids, and that these two modes of discourse existed only in relation to each other. 

- The End of Eddy, Eduard Louis (2014)