Annie Ernaux

Writer and professor

• Born: September 1, 1940
• Place of Birth: Lillebonne, France

• Significance: Annie Ernaux is a French writer and Nobel laureate who helped pioneer the literary genre called autofiction. Her books combine fiction and autobiographical elements, detailing deeply personal moments of her life along with their social and historical circumstances.

Background

Annie Ernaux was born on September 1, 1940, in Lillebonne, in the Normandy region of northern France, to working-class parents. The family moved to nearby Yvetot when she was young, and her parents ran a grocery shop and café there. In the private Catholic secondary school where Ernaux was educated, most students were from middle-class backgrounds, which caused her to feel shame about her lower social class for the first time and led to a lifelong examination of class struggles.

When Ernaux was eighteen, in 1958, she left home and worked at a summer camp. She subsequently worked in London as an au pair in 1960 before returning to France to study at the University of Rouen, Normandy. Although she began her college career working toward a degree in primary school education, she changed course and eventually earned her degree in literature from the university. In the mid-1960s, Ernaux passed two competitive examinations that qualified her as a secondary school teacher.

Career in Literature

Ernaux worked as a teacher for over three decades. She taught at secondary schools in Bonneville and in Annecy for several years before becoming a professor of literature in 1975 at the University of Cergy-Pontoise near Paris. In 1977, she joined the National Centre for Distance Education. She retired from teaching in 2000.

From the beginning of her career as an educator, Ernaux also wrote—at first, keeping it secret from her husband, who ridiculed her desire to be a writer. In 1974, her debut novel, Les Armoires Vides (Cleaned Out), was published. In it, she provided a fictionalized account of her ascent to the middle class, the resulting conflicts with her parents, and the illegal abortion she had in 1963.

Following the publication of that first novel in 1974, Ernaux went on to write more than thirty-five works. Ernaux’s works covered a range of topics, all related to her life. Common themes were class, sex, illness, death, and gender. A staunch feminist, Ernaux examined how shame and self-censorship play a central role in women’s lives. She wrote about the shame she felt due to her working-class background and her climb into the middle class, her first sexual experience, the illegal abortion she had when she was a university student, her marriage and its disintegration, the love affair she had with a younger man when she was middle-aged, her parents’ illnesses and deaths, and her experience with breast cancer. Although she wrote about her own experiences, she described them in a unique way, rendering them universal to all women.

Ernaux’s writing style can be described as stark, simple, and plain; her works are short, often less than one hundred pages. In her works, she avoids the use of metaphors and often uses the pronouns she and we rather than I. Furthermore, Ernaux’s semi-fictional works are not the typical chronology of her life. Rather, she examines one moment in her life from the perspective of the person she was at the time, without the advantage of hindsight or age.

After the publication of Les Armoires Vides, Ernaux wrote two additional works of fiction before publishing La Place (A Man’s Place) in 1983. Written after her father’s death, she had attempted to write a novel about her father but found fiction did not work for what she wanted to examine. Thus, she switched to autofiction, a type of memoir based on real-life events but told from an objective and collective point of view. La Place was well received and gained Ernaux recognition as a writer as well as the Renaudot prize. Following its publication, she continued to write autofiction. In 1987, Une Femme (A Woman’s Story) was published. It described her mother’s cognitive decline due to Alzheimer’s disease and eventual death. In both books, Ernaux described guilt about her “defection” from the working class, which she considered a betrayal of her parents.

Other notable works included La Honte (Shame; 1997), which opens with the statement that her father tried to kill her mother when she was twelve years old; L’Evénement (Happening; 2000), in which Ernaux further explores the illegal abortion that nearly killed her; Les Années (The Years; 2008), which uses songs, books, newspaper headlines, and advertisements to provide a collective autobiography of the author’s life between 1941 and 2006; and Mémoire de Fille (A Girl’s Story; 2016), which examines an eighteen-year-old Ernaux living through her first sexual experience. In 2020, she released a memoir called Hôtel Casanova, and in 2022, Le Jeune Homme (The Young Man), her love story with a much younger man. Also in 2022, Ernaux and her son created the documentary Les Années Super 8 (The Super 8 Years), consisting of home videos of her family life recorded during the 1970s.

In 2022, Ernaux became the seventeenth woman to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature. The Nobel Committee praised Ernaux for “the courage and clinical acuity with which she uncovers the roots, estrangements and collective restraints of personal memory.” Other awards and recognitions included the French Language Prize (2008), the Marguerite Duras Prize (2008), the Marguerite Yourcenar Prize (2018), and the Formentor Prize (2019). The English translation of her novel Les Années was also shortlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2019.

Impact

For decades, Ernaux has been very popular and highly regarded in France, where she is considered both a feminist icon and the doyenne of French literature. Her books are widely taught in schools and have influenced other writers from working-class backgrounds. Ernaux gained recognition in English-speaking countries after her book Les Années, widely considered her masterpiece, was published in English in 2017 as The Years. Her works have been translated into multiple languages, and some, such as L’Evénement (2021), were adapted into award-winning films. In 2022, she became the first French woman to win the Nobel Prize for literature.

Personal Life

Annie Ernaux and Philippe Ernaux married in the 1960s and divorced in the early 1980s. They had two sons, David and Eric. She lived in Cergy-Pontoise, a suburb of Paris.

Bibliography

“Biography.” Annie Ernaux, www.annie-ernaux.org. Accessed 14 Oct. 2024.

Blackhurst, Alice. “‘If It’s Not a Risk… It’s Nothing’: Nobel laureate Annie Ernaux on Her Unapologetic Career." Guardian, 21 May 2023, www.theguardian.com/books/2023/may/21/annie-ernaux-french-writer-nobel-prize-literature.  Accessed 14 Oct. 2024.

O’Rourke, Meghan. “Annie Ernaux Writes about Deep Pain with Cool Restraint.” The Washington Post, 7 Oct. 2022, www.washingtonpost.com/books/2022/10/07/annie-ernaux-appreciation/. Accessed 14 Oct. 2024.

Schwartz, Madeleine. “A Memoirist Who Mistrusts Her Own Memories.” Review of A Girl’s Story, by Annie Ernaux. The New Yorker, 13 Apr. 2020, www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/04/20/a-memoirist-who-mistrusts-her-own-memories. Accessed 14 Oct. 2024.

Uzan, Rafaela. “Annie Ernaux’s Nobel Shows Women’s Stories Matter Too.” The Cornell Daily Sun, 19 Oct. 2022, cornellsun.com/2022/10/19/annie-ernauxs-nobel-shows-womens-stories-matter-too/. Accessed 14 Oct. 2024.