‘I will write to avenge my people.’ It was as a young woman that Annie Ernaux first wrote these words in her diary, giving a name to her purpose in life as a writer. She returns to them in her stirring defence of literature and of political writing in her Nobel Lecture, delivered in Stockholm on 7 December 2022. To write of her own life, she asserts, is to ‘shatter the loneliness of experiences endured and repressed’; to mine individual experience is to find collective emancipation. Ernaux’s speech is a bold assertion of the capacity of writing to give people a sense of their own worth, and of one writer’s commitment to bearing witness to life, its joys and its injustices.

‘My father tried to kill my mother one Sunday in June, in the early afternoon.’ Thus begins Shame, the probing story of the twelve-year-old girl who will become the author herself, and the traumatic memory that will echo and resonate throughout her life. With the emotionally rich voice of great fiction and the analytical eye of a scientist, Annie Ernaux provides a powerful reflection on experience and the force of violent memory to endure through time, to determine the course of a life.

WINNER OF THE 2022 NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE

The diary of one of France’s most important, award-winning writers during the year she had a passionate and secret love affair with a Russian diplomat

Getting Lost is the diary Annie Ernaux kept during the year and a half she had a secret love affair with a younger, married man, a Russian diplomat. Her novel, Simple Passion, was based on this affair, but here her writing is immediate, unfiltered.

In these diaries it is 1989 and Annie is divorced with two grown sons, living outside of Paris and nearing fifty. Her lover escapes the city to see her there and Ernaux seems to survive only in expectation of these encounters, saying “his desire for me is the only thing I can be sure of.” She cannot write, she trudges distractedly through her various other commitments in the world, she awaits his next call; she lives only to feel desire and for the next rendezvous. When he is gone and the desire has faded, she feels that she is a step closer to death.
 
Lauded for her spare prose, Ernaux here removes all artifice, her writing pared down to its most naked and vulnerable. Getting Lost is as strong a book as any that she has written, a haunting, desperate view of strong and successful woman who seduces a man only to lose herself in love and desire.

Dans ce dialogue intellectuel et intime, la romancière Annie Ernaux et la sociologue Rose-Marie Lagrave, issues de la même génération, se livrent à une réflexion sur leurs trajectoires sociales : elles évoquent autant leurs points communs – familles modestes, normandes, bercées par le catholicisme –, que la manière différente dont elles se conçoivent en tant que transfuges de classe. Elles partagent ici leurs parcours, leurs lectures (de Pierre Bourdieu à Virginia Woolf), leurs rapports au travail, à la reconnaissance et à la vieillesse, et donnent à penser l’amitié féministe et l’écriture comme voies vers l’émancipation.
Texte présenté par Sarah Hechler, Claire Mélot et Claire Tomasella
Postface de Paul Pasquali

A revelatory meditation on class and consumer culture, from 2022 Nobel laureate Annie Ernaux"A dryly charming look at the way the French live now, through the sharp eyes of its most acclaimed chronicler."--Kirkus Reviews
For half a century, the French writer Annie Ernaux has transgressed the boundaries of what stories are considered worth telling, what subjects worth exploring. In this probing meditation, Ernaux turns her attention to the phenomenon of the big-box superstore, a ubiquitous feature of modern life that has received scant attention in literature.
Recording her visits to a store near Paris for over a year, she captures the world that exists within its massive walls. Through Ernaux's eyes, the superstore emerges as "a great human meeting place, a spectacle"--a flashy, technologically advanced incarnation of the ancient marketplace where capitalism, cultural production, and class converge, dictating our rhythms of desire. With her relentless powers of observation, Ernaux takes the measure of a place we thought we knew, calling us to question the experiences we overlook and to gaze more deeply into ordinary life.

In 1963, Annie Ernaux, 23 and unattached, realizes she is pregnant. Shame arises in her like a plague: understanding that her pregnancy will mark her and her family as social failures, she knows she cannot keep that child. This is the story, written forty years later, of a trauma Ernaux never overcame. In a France where abortion was illegal, she attempted, in vain, to self-administer the abortion with a knitting needle. Fearful and desperate, she finally located an abortionist, and ends up in a hospital emergency ward where she nearly dies. In Happening, Ernaux sifts through her memories and her journal entries dating from those days. Clearly, cleanly, she gleans the meanings of her experience.

J'ai toujours eu envie d'écrire des livres dont il me soit ensuite impossible de parler, qui rendent le regard d'autrui insoutenable. Mais quelle honte pourrait m'apporter l'écriture d'un livre qui soit à la hauteur de ce que j'ai éprouvé dans ma douzième année.

Annie Ernaux's father died exactly two months after she passed her practical examination for a teaching certificate. Barely educated and valued since childhood strictly for his labor, Ernaux's father had grown into a hard, practical man who showed his family little affection. Narrating his slow ascent towards material comfort, Ernaux's cold observation reveals the shame that haunted her father throughout his life. She scrutinizes the importance he attributed to manners and language that came so unnaturally to him as he struggled to provide for his family with a grocery store and cafe in rural France. Over the course of the book, Ernaux grows up to become the uncompromising observer now familiar to the world, while her father matures into old age with a staid appreciation for life as it is and for a daughter he cautiously, even reluctantly admires. A Man's Place is the companion book to her critically acclaimed memoir about her mother, A Woman's Story .

WINNER OF THE 2022 NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE

Taking the form of random journal entries over seven years, Exteriors captures the feeling of contemporary living on the outskirts of Paris. Poignantly lyrical, chaotic, and strangely alive.

Estate 1958. Per la prima volta lontana dalla famiglia, educatrice in una colonia di vacanze, una diciottenne scopre se stessa: l'amore, il sesso, il giudizio degli altri, la fatica di essere giovani, la sete di libertà. Tra la luce delle foto di quel tempo e il buio dei ricordi rifiutati, Annie Ernaux rivive l'età di passaggio che la trasformò in donna e in scrittrice, interrogandosi sui pensieri, le aspettative, le ritrosie (senza tralasciare i disturbi alimentari e le angosce della fertilità) della «ragazza del '58». In pagine piene di inquietudini e dolori segreti, traboccanti di slanci e di canzoni - l'«esperanto dell'amore» -, è la vergogna del passato a generare la memoria, rivelandosi inaspettato dono, irrinunciabile arma in quella «colluttazione con il reale» che è al cuore dell'impresa letteraria di Ernaux. "Memoria di ragazza", potentissima riflessione sulla scrittura e su un'epoca cruciale dell'esistenza, è il romanzo, proibito e inconfessabile, che l'autrice ha inseguito per tutta la vita.

L'occasion d'un banal examen dans un cabinet médical replonge la narratrice plus de trente ans en arrière, en janvier 1964, au moment de son avortement clandestin. Si le souvenir apparaît lointain, l'événement n'en est pas moins indélébile. A la fois égarée et démunie, pendant deux mois, la jeune femme d'alors a caché sa grossesse, à ses parents comme à ses amis proches, cherché désespérément une "faiseuse d'anges". C'est à Paris, rue Cardinet, que la narratrice trouvera l'infirmière clandestine qui lui plongera dans le sexe la sonde nécessaire. Et c'est à Rouen, dans sa chambre d'étudiante, banale et dérisoire, en compagnie de sa voisine, qu'elle sera "assise sur le lit, avec le foetus entre les jambes", véritable "scène de sacrifice". Pour la narratrice, il s'agit "d'entraîner l'interlocuteur dans la vision effarée du réel". <p>Récit autobiographique terrifiant et sensible, à valeur d'exorcisme, raconté dans la simplicité violente et cruelle des faits, L'Événement rappelle une société engoncée dans ses principes, ses tabous et ses préjugés de classe, en même temps qu'il révèle un événement vécu comme une initiation. <i>--Céline Darner</i> </p>

J'avais quitté W. Quelques mois après, il m'a annoncé qu'il allait vivre avec une femme, dont il a refusé de me dire le nom. A partir de ce moment, je suis tombée dans la jalousie. L'image et l'existence de l'autre femme n'ont cessé de m'obséder, comme si elle était entrée en moi. C'est cette occupation que je décris.<br />A. E

‘I too wanted to forget that girl. Really forget her, that is, stop yearning to write about her. Stop thinking that I have to write about the girl and her desire and madness, her idiocy and pride, her hunger and her blood that ceased to flow. I have never managed to do so.’ In A Girl’s Story, Annie Ernaux revisits the summer of 1958, her first away from home, when she worked as a holiday camp instructor in Normandy, and recounts the first night she spent with a man. When he moves on, she realizes she has submitted her will to his and finds that she is a slave without a master. Now, sixty years later, she realizes she can obliterate the intervening years and return to consider this young woman whom she wanted to forget completely. In writing A Girl’s Story, which brings to life her indelible memories of that summer, Ernaux discovers that here was the vital, violent and dolorous origin of her writing life, built out of shame, violence and betrayal.

is a personal narrative of the period 1941 to 2006 told through the lens of memory, impressions past and present—even projections into the future—photos, books, songs, radio, television and decades of advertising, headlines, contrasted with intimate conflicts and writing notes from 6 decades of diaries.
Local dialect, words of the times, slogans, brands and names for the ever-proliferating objects, are given voice here. The voice we recognize as the author’s continually dissolves and re-emerges. Ernaux makes the passage of time palpable. Time itself, inexorable, narrates its own course, consigning all other narrators to anonymity. A new kind of autobiography emerges, at once subjective and impersonal, private and collective.
On its 2008 publication in France,
came as a surprise. Though Ernaux had for years been hailed as a beloved, bestselling and award-winning author,
was in many ways a departure: both an intimate memoir “written” by entire generations, and a story of generations telling a very personal story. Like the generation before hers, the narrator eschews the “I” for the “we” (or “they”, or “one”) as if collective life were inextricably intertwined with a private life that in her parents’ generation ceased to exist. She writes of her parents’ generation (and could be writing of her own book): “From a common fund of hunger and fear, everything was told in the “we” and impersonal pronouns.”