In 2021, the renowned French author Annie Ernaux published Exteriors, a random selection of journal entries written while she lived for a time in the Parisian suburb of Cergy-Pontoise. It stands apart from the books that have made her reputation as a fearless chronicler of her own life and relationships – the likes of Simple Passion (1993), Happening (2001) and A Girl’s Story (2020) – eschewing the unflinchingly intimate and semi-autobiographical approach that helped earn her the Nobel prize in literature in 2022. Instead, as its name suggests, Exteriors is detached and outward-looking. Her aim, she said, was to “describe reality as through the eyes of a photographer and to perceive the mystery and opacity of the lives I encountered”.
Despite its oddly academic-sounding title, The Use of Photography – note the singular – bears little relation to its predecessor, being a return to the intensely personal style for which Ernaux is revered. The difference here is that, although the lens is once again turned on herself, her reflections – on desire, illness, memory and encroaching mortality as well as photography – are juxtaposed with those of her former lover Marc Marie, a journalist and photographer with whom she had a prolonged and passionate love affair in 2003. Rather than dilute the intensity of her prose, their to-and-fro conversation somehow works.
