Annie Ernaux’s work is proof of how expertly autobiography can be done. Across more than 20 books, the Nobel prize winner seems to have subjected every sentence to the literary equivalent of a polygraph test. Is it true? Is it the simplest and most direct way to say what is meant? Is it persuasive? Among the admirable results of her method are memoirs that manage to be at once tender, loving, clear-eyed and unsparing, sentences that seem effortless even when we can easily imagine how painful they must have been to set down on the page.
Her best-known works fall into three broad categories. Some, most notably A Man’s Place, focus on her childhood in a small town in northern France, where the solidly working-class values of her parents, who ran a grocery-cafe, made it complicated for their daughter to move into a bourgeois milieu that involved writing and eventually celebrity. Other books recount her difficult coming of age: university, teaching, undergoing an illegal abortion, getting married, having children. Then there are those that focus on her love affairs: Simple Passion recounts an obsessive relationship with a married Russian diplomat, a fraught and highly charged episode that she revisits in Getting Lost.
