Annie Ernaux’s Writing Has Given Dignity to the Lives of the Working Class

"Writing as the feminist movement gathered momentum, Ernaux would invent an entirely new language for speaking directly about women’s lives and desires. Far from much of the 1970s strand of French feminism, which sought to make sense of women’s experience by appealing to the abstract language of philosophy or the turns of phrase of so-called cultured literature, Ernaux kept her language grounded in the everyday. In her later work The Years (2008), she reflects on returning to her local dialect on visits to her hometown: “The language that clung to the body, was linked to slaps in the face, the Javel water smell of work coats, baked apples all winter long, the sound of piss in the night bucket, and the parents’ snoring.” It is not simply that she plumbs her own life for material — what writer doesn’t? — but that she radicalizes the genre of memoir by using it to link her own individual experience with that of other members of her class, generation, and sex. She shows how memoir, as the most direct expression of individual subjectivity, is inextricable from the historical social formations that it gives rise to."

read article by Jess Cotton

Annie Ernaux’s Writing Has Given Dignity to the Lives of the Working Class