Annie Ernaux at 84: How ‘oversharing’ made the Nobel Prize winner the master of the memoir

Annie Ernaux’s writing is informed by her fondness of everyday experiences, like many of us. But her process of articulating these experiences slips through her narration; it almost feels like she is always talking to herself, just as much as she is speaking to us readers, her audience. This balance allows her to articulate larger emotional truths about her life and the world. Through the act of writing about something, through the act of sharing, she deepens her experience of it, and investigates it even more intimately, which then goes on to become the foundation of her work.

When Ernaux’s memoirs first began to appear in print in the 1980s, nobody really knew how to react to her style of writing: she wrote about her parents, affairs, social class, and gave readers access to her life without any kind of emotional lift. The idea of writing the self was uncommon among literary spaces, and even more uncommon by women writers – there was a culture where books would only be recognised as “real literature” if they deviated from the autobiographical and veered towards the philosophical, and exclusively made overarching, so-called meaningful statements about the world we inhabit.

I read Simple Passions for a class that...

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