In part owing to her Nobel Prize in Literature win in 2022, Annie Ernaux’s popularity in the English-speaking world has grown immensely over the past 10 years. Her notable works include The Years, a decades-spanning tale of collective memory, and Happening, her painful account of an illegal abortion that nearly killed her. Ernaux is a notable pioneer of “auto-fiction,” a style of memoir in which the author recounts the events of their life through a fictionalized lens, often using the third person. This enables her to achieve a level of distance in her writing that adds immensely to its controlled prose. She is scrupulous in her details, playing the part of the forensic detective who peels back the layers of primary sources: letters, photographs, journal entries, to expose the truths they conceal. In doing so, she demonstrates the generalizing power of extreme specificity, inviting the reader to find their own lives reflected in her narrative.
As an Ernaux enthusiast, I personally find her 2016 memoir, A Girl’s Story (translated into French by Alison L. Strayer), the most compelling of her many works. It tells the story of the author’s time as a camp counsellor in the summer of 1958, and her all-consuming obsession with the indifferent “H.” She paints a brutally honest picture of herself at 17, a provincial girl experiencing her first taste of real freedom. Tracing the reverberations of this period outwards, we follow her as she moves directionlessly from place to place, trying to figure out her purpose. It is a portrait of an author in development, in the throes of uncertainty, as she comes to the conclusion that the only way to understand these experiences is to write about them.
Throughout the text, Ernaux juggles her two disparate identities: that of the awkward, naive youth and the woman of today, who is at once disgusted and fascinated by her past actions. All the while, she searches for a connection between the objective facts of her life and the subjective thoughts and feelings that they provoke. A Girl’s Story is a sort of psychological study, a description of events from the moment they occur to their immortalization in memory. Overall, this frank look at shame, desire, and coming of age is well worth the read for anyone who has lived through being a teenager and come out the other side (relatively) unscathed.
“Annie Ernaux” by Lucas_Destrem is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
