Nobel Prize literature winner Annie Ernaux writes about deep pain with cool restraint

By Meghan O'Rourke, Washington Post

Annie Ernaux’s command of sentences and structure makes her work feel at once meticulously crafted and unnervingly heated.

Ernaux, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature on October 6, was born in 1940 in Normandy and grew up in the town of Yvetot, where her parents ran a grocery store and cafe in a working-class area.

Her mother, she writes in “A Woman’s Story”, “knew all the household tips that lessened the strain of poverty”.

Not so Ernaux, a talented student who made her way to university and to a life in literature:

“This knowledge - handed down from mother to daughter for many centuries - stops at my generation,” she writes. “I am only the archivist.”

Over her lifetime, that archivist has produced a succession of slender, scorching and closely observed books about experiences that usually go unrecorded or unexamined, including an abortion, an affair, a rape that she is not sure can be called rape, and her own sense of shame at and alienation from her lower-class origins. Ernaux's novels and memoirs are slim but flashingly deep.

It would be false to call Ernaux a novelist or a memoirist. Although in the strictest sense she has written both novels and memoirs, her books unstitch our sense of genre, leaving us with threads and messy seams rather than tidy garments.

Better to simply call her a writer: a person who must put into words that which preoccupies her; not for therapeutic ends, not for consolation, but with a probing concern about that which wounds us.

Her novels draw on her life; her memoirs are novelistic.

A Woman’s Story, about her mother’s death from Alzheimer’s, summons its subject’s life in the early 20th century as immersively as fiction might. Growing up in Yvetot, inhaling books, the young Annie was both doted on and dismissed.

What unifies all her writing is its combination of an almost clinical remove with its access to the immediate feeling of great pain.

In “Happening”, she describes an illegal abortion she underwent in the 1960s in France. Much of the book concerns her trying to figure who will give her an abortion.

Ernaux debrides the debris from the illusion that we remain a single person our whole life. Reflection on past events, and how they stay with us and change us over time, undergirds her work.

The central events of her life are the starting point for a meditation on what remains elusive; she is able to get at the contingency of existence as well its steadiest currents.

In “A Girl’s Story”, she writes about her first foray away from home, as a counsellor at a summer camp, where she had a sexual encounter with a boy called “H” that she cannot quite bring herself to call a rape.

It induced in her a need to be seen that led to sexual promiscuity; the book is uncomfortable to read for the ways it frankly acknowledges how challenging it is for the author to write it.

However, never in her work do you find the glittery sense of narcissism or self-enthralment so common in personal writing; rather, the cool restraint is directed compulsively at something else, at trying to understand, or link, or otherwise simply describe what others might try to explain.

In every sentence of Ernaux’s books is an intensity of purpose, an urgency: She has to write.

The work is something more than self-exploration. It is lived philosophy, a need to enact.

Writing served as “a kind of morality for me”, she writes in “Getting Lost”.

“I forgave my husband’s pleasure seeking because he didn’t write. What else is there to do when you don’t write? Eat, drink, and make love.”

Or, as she puts it in “Happening”: “These things happened to me so that I might recount them. Maybe the true purpose of my life is for my body, my sensations and my thoughts to become writing; in other words, something intelligible and universal, causing my existence to merge into the lives and heads of other people.”

It is this quality of synthesised existence, the way she combines narration and thinking, that has me reading her over and over, as if I were looking in the window of her books and seeing a person looking back at me, merging book and life. It is an act of reading in which nothing is restored, but something is gained.