Annie Ernaux's memoir covers the years from just after the Second World War to the early 2000s, but it is told as the life of a collective rather than just the author. She writes of herself in the third person and calls herself she, pulling from photographs, songs, advertisements, news events and school books to show how French society changed: the postwar years, May 1968, feminism, consumerism, the Mitterrand era and the internet. Personal events such as her education, marriage, divorce, abortion and illness appear within that flow.
Readers curious about memoir that refuses to centre only the self will find a new form here. It is for anyone interested in how memory is built from shared cultural material, and in the experience of a girl from the provincial working class becoming a writer.
Deep, inward-looking, contemplative and open-ended; a moderate read.
Best for readers like The Mindful Reader. Which reader are you?
- Published
- 2008
- Publisher
- Gallimard
- Language
- FR
