Writing a Life: Reading Annie Ernaux

Each mortal thing does one thing and the same: Deals out that being indoors each one dwells; Selves — goes itself; myself it speaks and spells, Crying Whát I dó is me: for that I came.

Capturing quotidian moments of desire, curiosity, work, and love, Annie Ernaux immerses the reader in one life, which, as it goes along, becomes us. In more than 25 books, Ernaux names the strains of her growing up: the impact of World War II on her shopkeeper parents whose origins were in peasant families, the trauma of having an illegal abortion, a midlife affair, and the loss of her mother's mind due to dementia — investigating all of them in her feminist writings.

Ernaux was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature “for the courage and clinical acuity with which she uncovers the roots, estrangements and collective restraints of personal memory” (Nobel Prize, 2022a). Sometimes she writes from a distance and other times from incredible closeness. Notably, in The Years (2008), when she writes of we — with rare uses of I — the collective becomes a way of illuminating the personal. She translates memory into image, visual images into words, and self into prose.

Over the course of several of her books, I was drawn to Ernaux's original uses of life-writing. As I began reading her and about her, I found myself drawn down many tunnels: the history of the diary; several other women diarists; the autobiographical I; the creation of a sense of self; one's internal narrator, narrative, and psychoanalysis; and how the writer finds a voice in which to express the passage of time and absence. As a result of these wanderings, this paper reads like a collage of quotes from these various fields of thought, from Ernaux's and others' writings — and as such, it becomes my journal, a hold-all for the process. It is also my homage to Ernaux's form in The Years, in which she describes a photograph in words, making time move in a series of snapshots. The quotes become my version of