‘If it’s not a risk… it’s nothing’: Nobel laureate Annie Ernaux on her unapologetic career
When Annie Ernaux opens the front door to me at her home in Cergy, 40 minutes outside Paris, she immediately bursts out laughing. The source of her hilarity is my extensive baggage, which I’ve dragged from London on an early Eurostar. “Don’t worry,” I say, mortified, “I’m not planning to move in”, which causes more chuckles. Ernaux has a laugh that is delicate and raucous, generous and earthy. She laughs with and not at.
Ernaux is the first French woman to win the Nobel prize in literature. Her work exposes, without sentimentality or sensationalism, acute social inequality in France, especially as it affects women and working-class people.
Her books, written mainly in the first person in a deceptively straightforward style, have, since the early 1970s, created a deep intimacy with her readers, piercing the inflated egos of literary publishing and dissecting experiences as mundane and exceptional as unhappy marriages; passionate affairs; caring for ageing parents; being diagnosed with cancer and going through an illegal abortion. The unapologetic voice of an Annie Ernaux text – not quitenovel, not quite conventional memoir – is unmistakably hers, but also appealingly universal. Her voice is a container, she has said, for other people’s stories as well as her own.
Ernaux’s Nobel acceptance speech in December testified to her books’ aim to “break the solitude of buried and repressed things”. Though she lives alone with two rescue cats, she is the opposite of the reclusive, hermit writer, open about her need for “social time”.
Obtaining the world’s highest literary
accolade has boosted her public profile in recent months, taking her to Brussels, Brazil and New York City (where wild crowds queued to hear her talk with the American author Kate Zambreno). This summer, shewill travel to Italy, Turkey and the UK, where she will appear at Charleston festival alongside Sally Rooney. Last autumn, on the same day she returned to France from her victory-lap trip to Manhattan, she attended a cost of living protest in Paris. “Weren’t you exhausted?” I ask, thinking that, at 82, she might have wanted at least 24 hours to sleep off the jet lag. “Have you always had such energy for political engagement?” She looks about her airy living room, accented with a large bouquet of flowers and a handsome wall of books, then fixes me me with her intent gaze. “When an event demands you rise to the occasion, and you feel that you cannot… Well, actually, you can.”
Ernaux’s mother, Blanche, was the inspiration for her indefatigable work ethic. A well-read woman of workingclass origins, Blanche side-stepped a destiny of factory work by setting up and running a cafe-grocery, alongside Ernaux’s father, Alphonse, in their rural community in 1940s Normandy. This gained the family entry into the modest lower middle class. Ernaux’s childhood was in some respects edenic: reading for hours in bed with unlimited snacks from her parents’ store as they encouraged her to focus on her schoolwork rather than muck in with the family business. But as she excelled academically and progressed socially, she also experienced the visceralshame of classconsciousness (the smell of bleach in her parents’ house, compared with the fragrant odours in the homes of her more comfortable classmates; her mother once opening the door to one of her schoolteachers in a “stained nightgown”). Shame,from 1998, will be published for the first time in the UK this September.
Still, her mother’s strict “moral activism” (which Ernaux explores in her short account of Blanche’s life, A Woman’s Story, from 1988),together with her scorn towards “unuseful” women, ie women “who stayed at home and had no standing in the world”, has informed the economical or “factual” style of Ernaux’s books. She is determined that they be comprehensible to the social class she believes she betrayed by obtaining a degree in literature from the University of Rouen in 1971, becoming a published author and effectively joining the literary bourgeoisie. For Ernaux, influenced by the thinking of French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, class mobility is a violent, brutal process, and she sees it as her duty to at least attempt, via writing, to make amends to those she has left behind.
This perceived debt to her world of originshas also informed Ernaux’s restless activism, which in the 1970s saw her campaign on behalf of prochoice groups such as Choisir and the Movement for Abortion and Contraception Freedom (MLAC) in France, and continues with regard toissues as diverse as sexual harassment, the rights of French transport workers and assisted dying. She is scathing about the current government in France and its recent blunders over proposed amendments to the national age of retirement, which have provoked a bitter ongoing period of protests. “I have a text against Macron that my fingers are burning to write,” she admits (in 2020 she wrote a damning open letter to the president skewering his handling of the pandemic). Yet, since the Nobel prize announcement, she has been too busy to find a slot to write it. “Even if you don’t want such a thing to change your life, it inevitably does,” she says, with something close to wistfulness.
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Even before the Nobel victory, Ernaux’s 2022 was a sparkling vintage. Her first film, The Super 8 Years – made in collaboration with her son David Ernaux-Briot and featuring the author narrating archival family Super 8 footage from the 1970s – premiered at Cannes (it will be released in the UK in June). The project began as a favour to David, who went back through the family archives during lockdown and convinced his mother that the amateur home movies might be of interest to a wider public, partly because they capture universal family milestones such as Christmases, birthdays and summer holidays, but also because they paint a broader portrait of a decade that, after years of grim postwar austerity, saw robust social and political renewal in France. In contrast to the self-assured, fully present woman in front of me in Cergy, the Ernaux we encounter in some of this footage is uncertain, even timorous. In her early 30s, yet to publish her first book, she seems consumed by the weighty task of raising two young children and hobbled by her husband’s gaze (he controls the camera, in what Ernaux in her voiceover acknowledges as a “very gendered” division of labour).
Conversely, The Young Man,Ernaux’s latest book, which came out in France last May (and will be published in the UK in September), sees Ernaux in full possession of her powers, describing an incendiary affair she had in her 50s with a man 30 years her junior. Last year her 2000 memoir of the clandestine abortion she had in her 20s, Happening,found significant new audiences in a powerful screen adaptation by the French director Audrey Diwan. That a feminism anchored in bodily experience, “showing things as they are and not as they should be”, still has relevance to younger generations is extremely moving to Ernaux. She has one word for the initial publication of Happening in 2000, which was mostly met by stony silence from male and female critics alike, as “crap”.
Born in Lillebonne, Normandy, in 1940, Ernaux sees herself as fundamentally a “child of war”, conscious from a young age of history with a capital H. Both the large-scale and finer textures of everyday life are of equal concern to her. “Maybe that’s why I’m so obsessed with the quest for a collective memory,” she suggests.
Perhaps the fullest expression of that obsession was her breakout work in the English-speaking world, The Years (2008).It was an attempt to offer a faithful account of an entire generation in France – from the outbreak of the second world war to the birth of the internet – braiding one woman’s impressions of the era (her own) through a broader swirl of imprints made by advertising, world events, and period-specific cinema and music. Ernaux did no research for the book; she simply, she explains, activated her “internal cinema” for each specific period she wanted to recall. Her process places extraordinary faith in the power of subjective memory, an approach she began in 1983 with A Man’s Place. She has expressedreservations about the potentially “falsifying” force of fiction. Her fidelity is above all to accuracy,to describing events she has observed or closely experienced herself with as much precision as she can summon.
She is the first to accept that this approach – “almost a fetish for the real,” she quips – is not infallible. “All the images will disappear” is the opening sentence of The Years–but “sometimes they weren’t there to remember in the first place”, she laughs. She regrets only recently recalling, for example, an image of herself as a young child – “I can’t have been more than six” – sitting on her mother’s knee at a dinner her parents threw for British soldiers to celebrate the end of the second world war. “There was one British soldier in particular,” she says, delightedly. “I couldn’t stop staring at him.” “Was he in uniform?” I ask, a little brazenly. “But of course!”
Ernaux’s relation to male figures, from her childhood adoration of her father (who, in contrast to her mother, represented “distraction, games, tenderness”) to her rage at the “unquestioned, uninterrogated” patriarchy of French literary culture, is, she admits, complex, to say the least. The steep backlash to her Nobel win – both in the more conservative French press (Le Figarowaged a particularly ugly anti-Ernaux campaign, attacking her acceptance speech as “soulless”) and on social media (where hashtags claiming Ernaux was an “antisemite” owing to her support of Palestine ballooned on Twitter) – was, for her, symptomatic of a deeply masculine national system in which “women are not legitimate”. Yet the scale and extent of the attacks did surprise her. Even on France Culture, the country’s foremost intellectual radio station, which invited her to speak several times last November, she felt “patronised” and “treated with condescension”, as if she hadn’t “read Proust properly”, and as though her win was somewhat “unbearable” for France. “I was considered a threat,” Ernaux surmises, with remarkable serenity. “I ticked all of the wrong boxes and I never tried to please.”
I wonder how far Ernaux’s decision in the early 1980s to divorce her husband, Philippe Ernaux (he died from lung cancer in 2009), might explain the deep misogyny that has tinged her national reputation. It was a radical decision to become effectively a single mother to her two young sons, David and Eric, in a time and place when such a status was uncommon, and in a country shaped by centuries of devout Catholicism. Still, despite Ernaux’s loathing of the patriarchy, close relationships with men have played an important role in her life. “Men have counted for a lot,” she says, with the fizzing candour and concision that distinguishes her books.It isn’t difficult to see why many might have fallen for Ernaux’s charms. She is elegant, agile, and radiates charisma even in a grey wool jumper (“It’s cold outside, aren’t you cold?”). While the power of sex is a constant presence in
I have a text against Macron that my fingers are burning to write
Ernaux’s writing it is never gratuitous, but always deeply tied to a specific partner’s subjectivity and character. Unlike the bed-hopping antics of her contemporary Catherine Millet, for example, who made a scandalous impression in France with her 2001 account of an anonymous “mass” of sexual partners, The Sexual Life of Catherine M,sexuality in Ernaux’s books has a devotional charge, and, like her writing is more powerful when concentrated and distilled. “To live a passion for another person,” as she put it in her 1992 book Simple Passion, about an all-consuming physical relationship with a married Russian diplomat, is, she now insists, sipping a black coffee, “totally the opposite” of accumulating multiple sexual conquests.
To the Nobel prize ceremony and ensuing dinner, Ernaux wore a formal gown by Chanel, reporting to the designer’s legendary Rue Cambon headquarters in Paris for two fittings beforehand. “Do you want to see a photo of it?” she asks, excitedly springing from her seat, forgetting where she’s put her smartphone (“I’m awful with these things”). The dress is a chilled midnight blue with a stone motif circling the collar, complementing Ernaux’s light eyes and hair even in the harshness of the camera’s flash. I tell her she looks great. “Zoom in!” she commands. “You have to stretch the screen like this,” she adds,before showing me another shot, taken from the audience, of the moment she received the prize from the king of Sweden. She looks delighted, but admits the dinner was, for a non-English or Swedish speaker who had to have everything translated back to her, “much too long”.
In the press release accompanying the Nobel announcement, it was said that Ernaux had been awarded the prize “for the courage and clinical acuity with which she uncovers the roots, estrangements and collective restraints of personal memory”. Yet clinical feels too chilly a word to describe Ernaux’s lifelong effort to include the marginalised and forgotten within the lofty corridors of literature. “I have never spoken of cold things,” she affirms.
One consequence of the Nobel win that she regrets is that it’s now impossible to linger and chat with people at book events such as Paris’s annual Salon du livre.Now, she says, they are “like production lines”, the demand for signatures and selfies outstripping opportunities to actually connect. Much like her books, which have forged a new literary genre of folding subjective memories and observations into a shared sense of French history, Ernaux prefers to exist within a crowd: to be just one among many.
Some detractors have equated the brevity of Ernaux’s work with a lack of substance. The Young Man, for example,is a compressed, even audacious, 53 pages. Technically qualifying as an extended short story, and not even a novella, it inspired fierce memes on BookTok (“Where is this book? I can’t seeit for €8?” one user quipped, before giving it a rave review). The book also fed into global #agegap debates last year, on account of the 30-year difference in the central relationship it describes. Ernaux’s typical response to such naysayers has been to point out that literary length is not an indicator of literary labour:“My books are so short because I spend a long time writing them,” she has said.
Though she taught literature at secondary school from 1974, Ernaux has never taught creative writing and claims to be baffled by the fashionable US export of writing-workshop culture. It’s a stance perhaps in conflict with her otherwise strong public posture of sharing and open-source creation (Ernaux doesn’t believe she “owns” her texts and views her Nobel win as a collective effort). “I suppose these workshops help people not to make obvious faux pas,”she says now. “And, of course, there are writers who really need to know whether something’s goodor not.But at the end of the day it’s only you who knows…”
I ask whether other writers send her manuscripts to review and she smiles. “All the time. And random people, too. I tell them to send them to an editor!” To her own editor at Gallimard, with whom she has been working for around 15 years, she sent the masterpiece of The Yearscompletely finished, showing it to no one else beforehand (“Absolutely not!”). Her only piece of writing advice, if it can be called that, is: “If it’s not a risk [to write it] then it’s nothing.”
The willingness to take risks both in memory and writing, without seeking other people’s reassurance or approval, sets Ernaux apart from her peers. A Girl’s Story (first published in 2016, translated in 2020) was a narrative of the sexual abuse and trauma Ernaux suffered as a teenager from a male supervisor at a summer camp in Normandy in the 1950s and sparked debates about consent in France, before the watershed moment of #balancetonporc, or #MeToo. In contrast, The Young Manis a book about sexual empowerment, of coming into one’s own as a sexual subject and enjoying the maturity that brings. “Absolutely,” she replies, “and not at all about submission.”
At this moment, one of Ernaux’s cats walks in with a dead mouse clamped between its jaws. Ernaux clocks it – “Oh no!” she sighs, “don’t look!” – and offers to relocate our conversation outdoors, but I fear losing momentum. Soon, the crunching sound of rodent bones in feline teeth – “Lovely,” Ernaux grimaces – becomes a soundtrack to our conversation, and an audio prompt. “A similar thing happened tothe young man in the book. We spent our awkward night together, and the next morning, while he was having his breakfast, the cat I had at the time arrived and ate a mouse on the carpet in front of him. I think he had the impression that it was hewho was being devoured. Or the cat reminded him of me. He was much disturbed.
“But,” she adds, with a wicked laugh, as she sees me out, “I didn’t put that in the book.”
The Super 8 Years is in cinemas and on Curzon Home Cinema from 23 June; The Young Man and Shame will be published by Fitzcarraldo in September