Annie Ernaux: Memoirist of the personal, political and the universal

Ernaux, who has long been in the running for the world’s most prestigious literary award, is only the 17th woman writer to have won the Nobel Prize since its inception in 1901. In recent years, other women to have won the award include Louise Glück (2020), Olga Tokarczuk (2018) and Svetlana Alexievich (2015).

Who is Annie Ernaux?

A celebrated writer in France, Ernaux has only been discovered by the English-speaking world with the arrival of her books in translation in recent years. In 2019, The Years, her autobiography of sorts spanning from her birth in 1940 upto 2007, was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize. It won the Prix Renaudot in France in 2008, and the Premio Strega in Italy in 2016.

Born in Seine-Maritime in Normandy to parents who were grocers, Ernaux began writing when she was in college. Yet, after several rejections, her first book, Cleaned Out, would eventually be published only in 1974. She was 34 years old at the time, stuck in a difficult marriage and working as a French teacher. Since then, Ernaux has published over 20 books.

After her first three thinly-veiled autobiographical novels, that include Cleaned Out, Do What They Say or Else (1977), and The Frozen Woman (1981), the writer moved on to focus solely on memoirs with A Man’s Place (1983), writing with abandon about her working-class upbringing, the class shame she felt, her ill-fated marriage, her relationship with her father, the romantic liaisons she had had, her mother’s descent into Alzheimer’s and eventual death and her own struggle with cancer. Some of her most well-known works include A Woman’s Story (1987), Simple Passion (1991), and A Girl’s Story (2016).

Memoirist of an uncertain world

In A Woman’s Story, Ernaux writes, “I am only the archivist.” Indeed, in her books spanning over six decades, Ernaux has been the chronicler of not just her own experiences or that of her generation, she has also woven in fragments that speak of the lives of her parents’ generation and of those across the class divide.

Spanning across her life’s work are themes of sexuality and intimacy; social inequalities, grief and shame and the struggle between time and memory.

Despite the depth of her themes, Ernaux writes in simple, stripped-down prose, intent in its purpose of arriving at the heart of her experience. What sets Ernaux’s work apart is a realisation that no individual experience is independent of socio-political context and that memory is often a treacherous slope, made uneven by its inherent unreliability and implicit or open biases.

In that sense, her role as an archivist is akin to an archaeologist’s – to dig for relics and put the fragments together as best as possible for the purpose of arriving at an understanding of an individual’s place in history.

This understanding, however, is never static or constant, changing with each reading, recollection or revision. As a memoirist, Ernaux is forever making her readers aware of the fallibility of her own memory. Like them, she is also searching for clues into the past that will help her make sense of it.

She is visceral in her documentation, writing in detail about the pain and trauma of her abortion, the shame of her working-class childhood, her valiant attempt to remake herself through education and what it means to be a woman in a man’s world — invalidated at whim or embraced with desire.

Yet, at nearly every turn, she cautions about the inconsistency of what is perceived as truth. As she writes in Simple Passion, “Sometimes I wonder if the purpose of my writing is to find out whether other people have done or felt the same things or, if not, for them to consider experiencing such things as normal. Maybe I would also like them to live out these very emotions in turn, forgetting that they had once read about them somewhere.”