Imaginary interview with Annie Ernaux
by Charactorium · Annie Ernaux (1940 — ?) · Literature · 6 min read
It is in a modest house in the new town of Cergy-Pontoise, near the Val-d'Oise, that Annie Ernaux receives us, crossed-out notebooks laid on the table. Her voice is calm, almost clinical, without any emphasis. On the wall, old photographs — a child, a counter, a vanished Normandy.
—Where do you place the starting point of everything you have written?
In a café-grocery in Yvetot, Normandy, behind the counter where my parents served both cider and groceries. I grew up there, between two worlds that did not speak to each other: the working-class customers who came for a drink standing up, and the school that, each day, distanced me a little more from them. That counter was a border. On one side, the language of patois, gestures, work; on the other, correct French, the dictionary, learned manners. My mother, behind her cash register, was convinced that education would save me from the working class. She was right, and it is precisely this salvation that cost me the most. You cannot change worlds without betraying the first.
That counter was a border between two worlds that did not speak to each other.
—You often use the word 'shame.' What exactly does it cover for you?
Shame is not a vague feeling; it is a precise social fact. I experienced it as a child, when I measured the gap between my parents' way of speaking and that of educated families. You become what sociology calls a class defector: you rise, yes, but you carry with you a discomfort that never leaves you. It took me a whole book to name that. The danger, when you have succeeded through education, is to despise where you come from, to look at your own parents with the eyes of the world that adopted you. I have always refused that contempt. For me, writing is doing justice to that working-class milieu without betraying it a second time, without describing it from above. Shame, turned around, becomes a material, almost a method.
—It is said that you took more than ten years to write the book about your father. Why this slowness?
Because I first looked in the wrong place. I wanted to write a novel, with a plot, characters, style — and each time it rang false, almost indecent. Telling the life of a working-class man, my father, with the artifices of fine literature, was to betray him one last time, to force him into a world that was not his. I abandoned everything. It took me nearly fifteen years to understand that there was only one right form: stripped down, without metaphors, without added emotion. The day I wrote La Place that way, in 1983, the sentences came. The Prix Renaudot arrived that same year, but that is not what mattered: I had finally found how not to lie.
Telling my father's life with the artifices of fine literature was to betray him.
—How would you describe this form you call 'flat writing'?
It is a writing without effects, without lyricism, without those images that flatter the educated reader. A writing that resembles what I used in my letters to my parents: factual, straight, with nothing sticking out. La Place opens like this: 'My father died exactly two months to the day before I passed the agrégation in modern literature. He was sixty-seven years old and ran a café-grocery with my mother in a district of Yvetot.' Everything is there, dry, verifiable. Not an adjective to console. I understood that any beauty of style would have been a form of class contempt: the literature of the dominant to tell the story of the dominated. Flat writing is my most precise tool, like a notebook where one notes without embellishing.
—In Happening, you revisit the illegal abortion you experienced. What made you decide to tell it?
1963. I was a student, I was expecting a child I did not want, and the law made me a criminal. There was neither the Neuwirth Law, which would only authorize contraception in 1967, nor a fortiori the Veil Law. I had to find a back-alley abortionist, in illegality, silence, and fear of blood. I carried this for decades before daring to write it in Happening, in 2000. Not to confess — confession does not interest me — but because this experience was that of thousands of women whom History had erased. To write an intimate event is to tear it from shameful secrecy and make it a social fact, transmissible. When the book was adapted to film in 2021, I saw young women discover, stunned, what their grandmothers had gone through.
Confession does not interest me: it was about tearing from secrecy what thousands of women had lived through.
—Do you think an individual story like that can have a collective impact?
That is even my whole conviction. I never write 'I' to speak only of myself. My young woman's body of 1963, its distress, its blood, are only interesting because they tell the condition of all women of an era, before the laws changed. That is what I call autosociobiography: personal life read as the reflection of a collective trajectory. When people object that abortion is not a literary subject, I reply that nothing is more political than deciding who has the right to tell their own body. Happening is not a plea; it is a clinical statement, dated, precise. And statements sometimes act more powerfully than manifestos, because they cannot be accused of exaggerating.
—The Years is often presented as your most ambitious book. How did you construct it?
From photographs. I placed before me images from a whole life — a little girl in Yvetot, a young woman, a mother, a grandmother — and each snapshot opened an era, from the 1940s to 2006. But I refused the 'I.' I wrote 'she,' 'one,' 'we,' to merge my memory with that of an entire generation, the one that lived through the Glorious Thirty, mass consumption, television. The book begins with this sentence that haunts me: 'All images will disappear.' That is what writing fights: disappearance. Each photo is a fragile proof of a passage on earth, and the book tries to save what, without it, would return to nothingness.
Each photograph is a fragile proof of a passage on earth.
—What do you seek when you blend your intimate memory with that of an entire era?
I seek to bring collective memory into existence, that thing that no individual possesses alone. A song, a brand of laundry detergent, an advertising slogan, a reform: these are the sediments of a common life. In The Years, my personal memory is only one thread among millions, and that is what interests me — not what distinguishes me, but what connects me. For decades I have kept a diary, I accumulate notes, observations taken in the shopping centers of Cergy, in the metro, in the street. The stuff of History is not only in treatises: it is in a package, a meal, a television show watched in the evening. I am an archaeologist of the ordinary.
—In 2022, you became the first French woman to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature. How did you feel in Stockholm?
A strange responsibility, more than personal joy. In Stockholm, in December 2022, I thought of the little girl from the café-grocery in Yvetot, daughter of modest shopkeepers, to whom no one would have predicted this hall, these gowns, these speeches. The committee praised 'the clinical acuity' with which I explore the collective constraints of memory. But what mattered to me, I said in my speech: 'I will consider it an honor if readers, in France and elsewhere, can find in my books something to think about their own lives, their own experience.' That is the only Nobel that counts: not the consecration of a person, but the fact that strangers recognize themselves in a life that is not their own.
The only Nobel that counts is that strangers recognize themselves in a life that is not their own.
—What would you say to those who wonder what the point of writing one's own existence is?
That writing one's life is not admiring oneself in a mirror; it is offering a tool. When I wrote my mother's death — 'My mother died on Monday, April 7, at the nursing home of the Pontoise hospital' — I was not trying to cry in public. I was seeking the most just form to tell the story of a working-class woman, her ambition for her daughter, her emancipation through work. A singular life, written with enough precision, becomes the mirror of thousands of others. That is why I have never believed in the boundary between the intimate and the social, between literature and the sociology of Bourdieu that I have read so much. Everything I have lived, I have lived as an inquiry. And the inquiry belongs to everyone.
This imaginary interview was generated by artificial intelligence from sources documented in Annie Ernaux's profile. It dramatises what the figure might have said based on what we know about them, but does not constitute attested historical testimony. For primary sources and factual documentation, refer to the full profile.