Annie Ernaux’s writing is informed by her fondness of everyday experiences, like many of us. But her process of articulating these experiences slips through her narration; it almost feels like she is always talking to herself, just as much as she is speaking to us readers, her audience. This balance allows her to articulate larger emotional truths about her life and the world. Through the act of writing about something, through the act of sharing, she deepens her experience of it, and investigates it even more intimately, which then goes on to become the foundation of her work.

When Ernaux’s memoirs first began to appear in print in the 1980s, nobody really knew how to react to her style of writing: she wrote about her parents, affairs, social class, and gave readers access to her life without any kind of emotional lift. The idea of writing the self was uncommon among literary spaces, and even more uncommon by women writers – there was a culture where books would only be recognised as “real literature” if they deviated from the autobiographical and veered towards the philosophical, and exclusively made overarching, so-called meaningful statements about the world we inhabit.

I read Simple Passions for a class that studied the nuances of memoir writing as a genre of literature. When Ernaux’s work was being discussed, everybody seemed to be more focused on the “passion” aspect of the book, which is of course understandable, considering the novel is an account of an all-consuming affair. Moral judgements were thrown around, and her integrity as a person, and as an honest writer were questioned. Although Ernaux is oftentimes rabid and irrational, her desire, which is the core of this book, warrants so much explanation and logic in order to be understood. She leaves questions unanswered, and doesn’t tie up loose ends: why does Ernaux, an independent, feminist, foreword-thinking woman, get all-absorbed by an older man?

She does not treat her account of this affair as an explanation for why she acted the way she did. Rather, Ernaux simply shares, and becomes closer to herself and her history in the process. She gives us information about her life, her attention to the everyday – she lays details about herself, and places them within the context of the larger political circumstances of the world. Through her condensed prose, she outlines how the circadian rhythms of eating, sleeping, cooking, shopping aren’t a separate reality. They do not exist in a different dimension from world affairs and other big events.

The Years, Ernaux’s Nobel prize-winning memoir, is an autobiography built using the chronology of historical contexts, social transformations and political dynamics of France during World War 2, up until the present. Her contextualization of daily life with history is bizarre, and it is what makes her body of work so deeply memorable. What does this kind of sharing of information mean in 2024? In the face of global genocides, environmental crises, and crumbling metropolitan infrastructure, what happens to daily life? It goes on, it always has. The moulding of narratives, to accommodate space for the Big Things, as well as the Little Things, is the succinct nature of Ernaux’s prose.

What Ernaux realised so many years ago, and made so acutely clear through her writing, is that the sharing of daily, simple information about our lives is crucial to creating space for ourselves, and helps us make meaning of our existence. The world around us may be burning, but people will still be drawn to share recent workout routines, a new breakfast recipe, a funny tweet they came across, someone they made eye contact with. Ernaux puts this very principle to practice, and creates a collage of history, feminism, pop culture and blends it with morsels of herself from the 1940s, thus creating a vivid reimagination of her life, combining imagery and analysis. The book gains momentum as it progresses, with the 90s passing quickly in contrast to the slower, more turbulent 60s in Paris. The intertwining of personal life with historical events is striking, demonstrating the relativity of time, and making The Years exceptionally impactful.

A Girl’s Story is a meticulous, all-inclusive reading of the tumultuous, heavy relationship that is shared between the selves we are, and the selves we once were. The story is right at the thick of heartbreaks and urges of the barrier between the past and the present, and our hunger in trying to overcome it, whilst simultaneously running away from it.

She writes this memoir with a certain liberality and unguardedness – long after finishing the book, Ernaux’s memories of girlhood slipped into my own, and left me thinking about ways of preserving memory. She reflects on the summer of 1958, when she worked as a holiday camp instructor in Normandy, and looks back on her first night with a man. She unravels a youth filled with desire and shame, marked by both internal and external degradation. She uses the greyness of her memory to her advantage; she doesn’t chase accuracy, or the need to paint the perfect portrait, but presses her memory firmly onto the pages of this book as a simple act of preservation.

I think about the way we’ve adapted to sharing information in the digital age, I can’t help but wonder what Ernaux has to say about it, as someone whose documentation of herself merged with literature, and politics, with individual experience. Her methodology prompts a profound inquiry: how will we ever achieve empathy if we abstain from sharing our personal narratives and engaging in meaningful dialogue?

In the college classroom where I was introduced to Ernaux, she was accused of “oversharing”. She hands us cringe on a platter: elaborate sex details, chasing after men who give her crumbs in return, and illicit affairs. Oftentimes, the margins of her life dominate the epicentre of her books: which is all to say that Ernaux’s prose is intoxicatingly specific about time and place, her stories belong to countless intellectually sharp girls with ambition without access to practical sense, who, like Ernaux, have had to navigate the complexities of sexism and sexuality. In reclaiming the girl she was, Ernaux becomes the master of the memoir.

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