Born in a working class family in Normandy, Annie studied at the Universities of Rouen and Bordeaux, became a school teacher and then got a higher degree in modern literature.
Right from her first work, she turned away from fiction to autobiography. All her works are based on her individual life experiences ranging from her teenage years, her marriage, abortion, passionate affairs, tryst with Alzheimer’s disease, breast cancer and the death of her parents.
In the 60 years and 20 books since the summer of 1958, she has been devoted to a single task: the excavation of her own life. All her works are small, simple, rarely exceeding a hundred pages. In each, she is always asking how she can be sure that her memories are correct.
Her magnum opus was Les Années (The Years), the historical memoir she wrote in 2008. In this book, Ernaux wrote about herself in the third person and gave a vivid account of the post-Second World War France till 2000. It is the moving social story of a woman and of the evolving society she lived in.
The central theme of all her books has been the awareness that the most intimate moments of life are always governed by the circumstances in which they occur. In the 2016 book ‘A Girl’s Story’, she writes about her first sexual experience as a teenager.
Ernaux is an unusual memoirist: she distrusts her memory. She writes in the first person, and then abruptly switches and speaks about herself from a distance, calling herself “the girl of ’58”. At times, it seems as though she were looking at herself in old photographs or reading out diaries written years earlier. She often gets lost in her stories with her memory turning blank. She tells us when she is getting lost in the story, and where her memory goes blank.
The Nobel Committee has said: Annie Ernaux has been given the award “for the courage and clinical acuity with which she uncovers the roots, estrangements and collective restraints of personal memory”.
