the round trip of a child prodigy, between her native Normandy and Nobel Sweden

France 5 – FRIDAY NOVEMBER 29 AT 10:55 P.M. – DOCUMENTARY

From Lillebonne to Stockholm, and back. In Annie Ernaux. I was born somewherefor director Coralie Miller, it is a question of retracing the journey which led the writer, née Duchesne, from the small town of Seine-Maritime where she was born, in 1940, to the Swedish capital where she received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2022. But also to bring back to her native Normandy the one who, at the age of 22, swore in her diary “avenge [sa] race » through writing.

The pilgrimage took place in September 2023, on the occasion of a literary festival. The images of the child prodigy returning to where she had lived, before the family moved not far away, to Yvetot, structure the documentary alongside an interview with the author in her living room in Cergy and archives tracing both her career and the collective history in which her life was written (bombings of the Second World War, feminist and anti-colonialist struggles, etc.). The words she pronounces in an interview are matched by extracts from her books, since Empty cupboards (Gallimard, 1974) until Girl’s memory (Gallimard, 2016).

“Avenge [sa] race »therefore, as she repeated, sixty years later, in her speech in Stockholm. But what “race” is this? That of the poor who “do not have a very distant memory”for lack of having “never owned the land” ; that of his grandfather who “can neither read nor write, and that is the definition given to him”.

Difficulty speaking in public

Annie Ernaux’s parents, Alphonse and Blanche, rose a little on the social ladder by running a café-grocery store. “They passed to the other side by becoming bosses, but they did not leave the world of workers”notes their daughter, pushed to study by her mother who had “great admiration for teachers, writers”.

“I was raised with the idea of ​​equality”, underlines the one which was just as much in Catholicism (“I took religion very seriously”), and which was deeply marked by the « dissociation » between the language of the (private) school and that of the home. She sees this as the origin of a difficulty in speaking in public, which makes writing her “natural means of communication”.

I was born somewhere focuses essentially on the first twenty-five years of his life, the breeding ground for his work – the childhood evoked in At Place, Shame (Gallimard, 1983 and 1997) or even The Other Girl (Nil, 2011); deflowering by rape, recounted in Girl’s memory ; abortion of Empty cabinets and of The Event (Gallimard, 2000)…

Fervent readers of Ernaux will probably not learn much about him in this documentary filled with empathetic admiration. But the film is interesting in that it seems, echoing the writer’s work, a reflection on time, nourished by images of the author at different ages of her life. The last scene sees her, in November 2023, at the first “counter-salon of old people”, where, aged 83, she evokes the dizziness of her age and assures that she has not “nothing more to say”. This does not mean “no more to write”.