The news that Annie Ernaux has won this year’s Nobel Prize in Literature will have made many writers exclaim with joy, such is the connection that her work makes with its readers. Ernaux’s explorations of the relationship between life and memory have captured decades of French history and women’s experience in ways that push what is possible in literature, nonfiction and the spaces in between.
[ Nobel Prize in Literature 2022 awarded to French author Annie ErnauxOpens in new window ]
As artist in residence at the Irish Cultural Centre in Paris last month, I binge-read every Ernaux translation I could get my hands on, each book leading into the next as she seemingly effortlessly moved from harrowing memory to wild eroticism to grand history in a style that was somehow both uniquely “flat” and intensely affecting. I was well aware of how cliched it was to devour Ernaux in Paris, but I was obsessed, not just with her extraordinary writing but also with how that writing seemed to wrestle with, and prove, the importance of writing itself.
Annie Ernaux has called herself ‘just a woman who writes’, but her work shows how political and powerful that is
We rarely realise, Ernaux writes in A Girl’s Story, a vital feature of our own lives — “our failure to understand what we experience, at the moment we experience it”. Every moment lives on in time and reflection, and only through writing could Ernaux find ways to understand her own life, and how it related to the world. Through reading her words, many of us have understood our own lives better too.
[ Simple Passion by Annie Ernaux: The exquisite pain of passionOpens in new window ]
A Woman’s Story grew from Ernaux’s attempts to deal with the grief of her mother’s death, and the feeling that “it is now my turn to bring her into the world”. “Where is my story?” she would wonder in the desolation she felt at the end of a wild affair in Simple Passion, sifting through the fragments of memory in the diaries published this year in English as Getting Lost. “I cannot give up writing the world,” she wrote frustratedly in those diaries, as if writing was both the thing driving her mad and the thing keeping her sane. “I write my love stories, and live my books, in a perpetual round dance.” Ernaux has called herself “just a woman who writes”, but her work shows how political and powerful that is.
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When she was finally able to reflect on the trauma of her teenage illegal abortion, in Happening, she wonders if the purpose of her life is for her body and thoughts “to become writing, in other words something intelligible and universal, causing my existence to merge into the lives and heads of other people”. In Exteriors, her journal entries from a suburban Paris “bereft of memories”, she realises from watching people on trains and streets how we all “secretly play a role in the lives of others”.
[ Exteriors: A masterclass in understatementOpens in new window ]
Throughout her career, Ernaux had thought about the idea of what she called “a total novel”, something that could “convey the passage of time inside and outside of herself”. In The Years, Ernaux wrote “History” from the third-person voice of a woman who had decided it was “her time to tell the story”, bringing together the personal and collective experience of postwar France. The decades flow in a way that you begin to see the history in your own story, to glimpse the space where life and writing meet, and in doing so understand why we read and why we write.
Ernaux’s stylistic and literary influence on today’s “autofiction” (a term she rejects) is undeniable, but her achievements go much, much further than any genre, reminding us of one of the most vital and eternal functions of writing: the power to “save something from the time where we will never be again”.
Christopher Kissane is a historian and writer
