Annie Ernaux

Annie Ernaux, born Annie Thérèse Blanche Duchesne, is a French writer, professor of literature, and Nobel laureate. Her literary work is described as lightly fictionalized memoir with close links to sociology. In 2022, Annie Ernaux received the Nobel Prize in Literature "for the courage and clinical acuity with which she uncovers the roots, estrangements and collective restraints of personal memory.” For her book The Years, she won the Prix Renaudot in 2008 and the Premio Strega in Italy in 2016 and was shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize in 2019. She was awarded the Marguerite Yourcenar Prize in 2017 for her life's work. Her books A Man's Place and A Woman's Story have become contemporary classics of French literature.

Ernaux's writing has become famous for pushing the boundaries of memoir, in a style that has been called flat, observational, and reportorial in the way she inventories the surface of things, even in the midst of mad motives and cruel fates. This has led some to comment on her writing as an investment in images that few other writers have been able to imitate.

Annie Ernaux during the 1960s.

Annie Ernaux, née Duchesne, was born in 1940 in Lillebonne, France to a working-class family. Her parents moved the family to Yvetot, where they owned a café and grocery shop in a working-class district. They earned enough to send Annie Duchesne, their only daughter after Duchesne's older sister died shortly before Annie was born, to a private Catholic secondary school. During this period, she would later recall, she experienced her first feelings of shame of her background and upbringing and shame of being from a working-class background while encountering her classmates from middle-class backgrounds.

In 1958, at eighteen, Annie Duchesne left home to work at a summer camp. She then went on to work in London in 1960 as an au pair. Duchesne returned to Rouen for her first attempt at higher education and trained to become a primary teacher. She eventually abandoned her primary teacher training course and pursued a degree in literature, earning her degree in modern literature in 1971. During this period, Duchesne wrote her first book, which would eventually be rejected by publishers for being "too ambitious."

In 1964, Duchesne married Philippe Ernaux and became the mother of two children. She qualified as a secondary school teacher in French and taught at the secondary school Annecy, Haute Savoie, from 1966-1977. The change in circumstances of going from a working-class daughter to a middle-class career woman would inspire her first published novel, Cleaned Out, in 1974.

Annie Ernaux with husband Philippe Ernaux.

By 1977, the family moved to Cergy-Pontoise, a town in the Paris region, and Ernaux left her secondary school teaching job to take a post at the Cned, Centre for Distance Education, where she worked until 2000.

Philippe and Annie Ernaux divorced in 1984.

Annie Ernaux's writing career has included twenty-four published books, a number of essays, and short stories. Various pieces of her works have been translated, and some have been adapted into award-winning films—such as L'Evenement, which won the Golden Lion at the 2021 Venice Film Festival. Ernaux has remarked in interviews that she believes in the liberating force of writing. Her work is written in plain language, which has been called "scraped clean."

Cover for Les armoires vides.

In 1974, Annie Ernaux published her first book, Les armoires vides, which would be translated in 1990 and titled Cleaned Out. In the book, she offered a fictionalized account of an illegal abortion she underwent in 1964. This book caused tension in the marriage between Annie and Philippe, as she wrote the autobiographical novel in secret, telling her husband she needed time alone to work on a Ph.D. thesis. Her husband would suggest, upon finding she wrote a novel instead, that if Annie Ernaux could write a book in secret, she would be capable of cheating on him.

Her fourth book, La place, was published in 1983 and was later translated as A Man's Place in 1992. This book is considered Ernaux's literary breakthrough. The book offers, in a little more than a hundred pages_, a dispassionate portrait of her father and the social milieu that formed him. The portrait saw Ernaux develop her restrained and ethically motivated aesthetics, which would be seen in her following autobiographical prose, which seemed to do away with a narrative voice by neutralizing and anonymizing the voice as much as possible.

Cover of La place.

Throughout the book, Ernaux inserted reflections about her writing, where she worked to distance herself from the poetry of memory and advocated for une écriture plate (a plain writing), which offers solidarity with the world her father grew up in and his language. The concept écriture plate is related to a striving toward a "zero degree of writing" described by Roland Barthes. And is influenced by a political dimension, of the feeling of treason Ernaux felt from the social class she departed—a political element that some suggest is behind all of her writings. Ernaux was aware of the political element in the writing and noted that her purpose in writing was to tear veils of imagination to reveal the truth.

In 1987, Ernaux followed La place with Une femme, which would be translated in 1990 to A Woman's Story and offered a similar portrait of her mother. This portrait offered shifting elucidations from fiction, sociology, and history, another hallmark of Ernaux's writing. And the severe brevity of the tribute to her mother had less shame or silence as the portrait of her father did.

Cover for Passion simple.

Published in 1993, Passion simple, later translated to Simple Passion, would become a bestseller in France. The book describes a fictionalized version of an obsessive affair Ernaux had with a married diplomat, years after the end of her marriage, and with two grown-up sons. The book would be lauded for its finesse in skirting the usual cliches of illicit love affairs and for, through her style of writing, uncovering tensions between what an individual wants and what the individual will settle for.

Cover for Les annees.

Often considered to be Annie Ernaux's masterpiece, Les années was published in 2008 and would be translated into English in 2017 as The Years. The book earned Ernaux the Marguerite Duras and the François Mauriac prizes. The 2017 English translation was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize International. The work offers an innovative form, intertwining personal and collective history of over six decades. It is considered her most ambitious project and has been called a sociological epic of the contemporary Western world. Ernaux substitutes, through the narrative, the spontaneous memory of the self with a third-person collective memory, suggesting the force of the zeitgeist on her life.

Ernaux's work has been compared with Marcel Proust, whose work was autobiographical and dealt with memory and how he came to be the person he was; however, rather than having the affective memory of Proust's works in which the narrator transports themselves, her memory is formed by the world she grows up in, by the stories she is told, the songs being sung, and the trends in rule. And as these conventions pass by, Ernaux sees it more difficult to recognize the person she once was. Proust writes with floral and languid language and his descriptions of memory, and Ernaux is the opposite, with often short books that are intense in their sparing examination.

Ernaux has noted her biggest influence as English author Virginia Woolf, whose writing expressed a sensitivity to the world—as sensitivity to which Ernaux aspired, and for some, has achieved.

Nobel prize sketch of Annie Ernaux.

In 2022, Annie Ernaux became the first French woman to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature. She was the seventeenth woman and the sixteenth French writer to receive the prize, which has been awarded to 119 writers since its establishment in 1901. The last French writer to be awarded the prize prior to Ernaux was in 2014 when the prize went to Patrick Modiano.

Anders Olsson, chair of the Nobel committee, stated Ernaux was awarded the prize for:

... the courage and clinical acuity with which she uncovers the roots, estrangements, and collective restraints of personal memory. ... Ernaux consistently and from different angles examines a life marked by strong disparities regarding gender, language, and class.