French author Annie Ernaux has written more than 20 books in a career spanning 50 years. Thanks to her Nobel prize win in 2022, and the commitment of the translators and independent presses who have championed her writing, more and more people in the English-speaking world are discovering her work. Sinéad Gleeson suggests where to begin.
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The entry point
Annie Ernaux’s practice is often to circle back: to the same people, themes and situations. To understand the kind of writer she is, a good place to start is her formative years and the impact certain key people made on her becoming a writer. In her latest work, Shame, she examines – in her typically clear-eyed way – her father and his motivations, his fear of failure and loss of face. Her parents inform so much of her narratives (in I Remain in Darkness, she attempts to come to terms with her mother’s dementia), hovering over the work not least in the first line of Shame: “My father tried to kill my mother one Sunday in June, in the early afternoon.”
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The one you’ll recommend to others
There are many things Ernaux does well, but she is unparalleled on desire and love: the full-bodied joy, but also the brutal lows of it. Simple Passion is a sliver of a book that captures the freefall of obsessive love and the manic, mangled why-doesn’t-he-call? time shifts of an affair. Ernaux is superb on the power dynamics and inequality of some relationships.
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If you’re in a rush
Two of Ernaux’s recently published books clock in at 40 and 48 pages respectively. The Young Man focuses on a relationship with a student 30 years younger. Prevalent in her work are acts of remembering – how memory is not a distant, unreachable thing but something that stalks the present. Reliving those wild days with a younger man triggers a meditation on age and mortality. When she was a girl, Ernaux wrote the phrase “I Will Write To Avenge My People” in her diary. It was to light the path of her writing life, and is the published title of her 2022 Nobel speech, where she passionately outlines the importance of writing and creativity.
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The masterpiece
A Girl’s Story begins in the late 1950s, when Ernaux was a teenager working at a summer camp. The story moves back and forth to the events of that summer and her own attempt to write about it 60 years later. She is “haunted by the girl of ’58”, and fears that she’ll die before she gets the story on to the page. “I too wanted to forget that girl, that is, to stop yearning to write about her.” This is the nub of the book – the inability to expunge some of that summer and how it shaped her. Desire, one of her ongoing themes, is ever present, and now looking back, she is horrified at how she and other women were shamed for exploring physicality and sex. Ernaux unpacks this inherent discrimination: how sexual desire is normalised as a part of life for men, but rooted in judgment for women. A Girl’s Story is more than an autofictional account of a pivotal summer, but expands into the craft of writing and the possibilities of what it can do. Years later, online, she looks up the man who treated her badly and finds a triumphant, mic-drop kind of peace: “I do not envy him: I am the one who is writing.”
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The one you’ll never forget
In 1963, when Happening is set, abortion was still illegal in France. Faced with an unplanned pregnancy, this book is a journey through Ernaux’s emotions as she attempts to coax a doctor to carry out an abortion. There is a base level of fear: of her situation, but also of the life she wanted slipping away. Shame returns, intersecting with class and hopelessness. Ernaux is always an anti-sentimentalist, never seeking or needing pity from the reader, but especially here. She is also a pragmatist, a doer, who knows what’s necessary to hold on to her dream of being a writer. Ernaux tells the story, but through a distinctive “I” persona, flitting between recounting the facts of the time, and her interpretation of those events as both an older woman and as a writer.
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The one that deserves more attention
Many people go to Ernaux for passion, relationships and the human condition, so Exteriors feels slightly out of sync with her other work. It’s no less worthy, and sees the writer step out of the often claustrophobic, interior world of her interpersonal relationships and into the outside world. Ernaux offers us a glimpse into spaces that intersect with her own life: dentist’s waiting rooms, hypermarkets, train stations, all presented as lyrical snapshots. Reading it reminds me of Natalia Ginzburg’s writing about objects, or Maeve Brennan’s encounters with public spaces in New York.
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If you only read one, it should be
Spanning the years 1941 to 2006, many people consider The Years to be Ernaux’s magnum opus. It’s a line-blurring work, of memoir, cultural observation and auto-fiction, whirling through history, language, ideas and memory. The voice slips from a communal “we” to third person “she”, pitting thoughts against action, fact against musings. Simply put, it’s an account of one woman moving through the world – via jobs, children, writing – and attempting to come to terms with the passage of time. It’s her best book, drawing together all the things she’s capable of as a writer. Ernaux is possibly the greatest writer at work today. Do read all of her books, made available to English-speaking readers through the brilliant, nuanced work of her UK translators Alison L Strayer and Tanya Leslie.
• I Will Write to Avenge My People: The Nobel Lecture by Annie Ernaux, translated by Alison L Strayer, is out now (Fitzcarraldo, £6.99), and English translations of Shame and The Young Man will be published on 20 September. To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copies at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
