Annie Ernaux: her 5 must-read books

Flat writing, a dry style… At the start of his career, the stories of Annie Ernaux are torpedoed by a masculine and bourgeois critic, who rejects the miserabilism shown by his novels. Contemporary of the sociologist Pierre Bourdieushe takes up her idea of ​​capital inheritance. In the suburbs of the work ofAnnie Ernauxthe aesthetic disposition and taste for form specific to the dominant classes apply in all areas of life. “Reading in the 1970s The Heirs, Reproduction and later La Distinction, it is always to feel a violent ontological shock. […] The vision we had of ourselves and others in society is being torn apart. Our place, our tastes, nothing is more natural and self-evident” she wrote in 2002 for The Worldupon the death of the sociologist.

Crowned in 2022 with the Nobel Prize for Literature, Annie Ernaux was rewarded for “the courage and clinical acuity with which she discovers the roots, the distances and the collective constraints of personal memory” then explained the jury. Today, French Vogue looks back at his most notable books, the reading of which leaves no one indifferent.

Empty cupboards (1974)

After studying between Rouen and Bordeaux, then a marriage, followed by settling in Annecy, Annie Ernaux divorced, and arrived in 1975 in Cergy, which she has not left since. At the same time, she published her first novel, Empty cupboardswhere his parents already occupy the preponderant place they hold in all his work. Indeed, quickly, the stories ofAnnie Ernaux slide towards autobiography: “From At Place [1983]there is something of the order of transgression in my writing, since I only talk about myself – and I talk about it in the most hidden, most sexual way”. If the writer is never rewarded with the Goncourt Prize, each of her books is always eagerly awaited by critics.

However, make no mistake. Behind its heroine and narrator, the student Denise Lesur, it's good Annie Ernaux who speaks and unfolds her early years, painting the portrait of her Norman childhood with her merchant parents until adolescence and the discovery of a completely different culture, through which she ends up standing against her family. A book written in secret, and which first marks the beginning of the literary adventure explored by Ernaux.

The Frozen Woman (1981)

Judith Butler has she read the works ofAnnie Ernaux ? She would find a certain interest there, as the masculine and feminine universes are in constant dialogue, meet, and sometimes, exchange their roles. Born in 1940, Annie Duchesne grew up in the café-grocery store run by his parents, in Yvetot, in Upper Normandy. Her father is a daddy who loves playing with his daughter, while her mother, a feminist without ever saying it, does what she pleases and can't stand authority. It is this same mother who hires the young Annie on the road to reading, a way of triumphing over a too modest condition: “My mother's naivety, she believed that knowledge and a good profession would protect me against everything, including the power of men”, we can read in The Frozen Woman.

Third novel byAnnie Ernaux, The Frozen Woman is probably one of the most scathing of her works, motivated by a strong feeling of injustice of having been born a woman, and of seeing herself so constrained by her gender – even in her intimate life, when she feels locked in a first marriage which makes her deeply unhappy. At the crossroads between Pierre Bourdieu et Simone de Beauvoir.

Passion simple (1992)

“I am the writer, the whore, the foreigner, the free woman too. I am not the 'good' that we possess and show off, that consoles. I don’t know how to console”. Sharp and concise: Annie Ernaux has been all his life, as illustrated by this passage from Get lost (2001). The book is a rewrite of Passion simplewhich hit the headlines when it was released in 1992, and sparked a lively debate on the decency of such a story – that of the affair that the writer had with a Russian diplomat. In The Grosse Bertha – ancestor of Charlie Hebdo, Jeanne Folly written, after the passage of Annie Ernaux In Apostrophes : “A trio of Palmolive blondes including the falote Annie Ernaux who claims that those who say bad things about his book are just dirty sexist machos who don't understand anything, mini-skirted and pinched ass. We want to tie her to the radiator and dry sodomize her”.