When Annie Ernaux opens the front door to me at her home in Cergy, 40 minutes outside Paris, she immediately bursts out laughing. The source of her hilarity is my extensive baggage, which I’ve dragged from London on an early Eurostar. “Don’t worry,” I say, mortified, “I’m not planning to move in”, which causes more chuckles. Ernaux has a laugh that is delicate and raucous, generous and earthy. She laughs with and not at.
Ernaux is the first French woman to win the Nobel prize in literature. Her work exposes, without sentimentality or sensationalism, acute social inequality in France, especially as it affects women and working-class people. Her books, written mainly in the first person in a deceptively straightforward style, have, since the early 1970s, created a deep intimacy with her readers, piercing the inflated egos of literary publishing and dissecting experiences as mundane and exceptional as unhappy marriages; passionate affairs; caring for ageing parents; being diagnosed with cancer and going through an illegal abortion. The unapologetic voice of an Annie Ernaux text – not quitenovel, not quite conventional memoir – is unmistakably hers, but also appealingly universal. Her voice is a container, she has said, for other people’s stories as well as her own.
