Before being awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2022, Annie Ernaux had enjoyed considerable success in France for her slim volumes of what might now be called “autofiction,” works investigating key events and core relationships from her past and published over the past forty-plus years. Most are available in English translation from Seven Stories Press, including Happening (translated by Tanya Leslie), an unflinching account of an abortion Ernaux undertook in 1963 when she was a university student in Rouen, France. Ernaux sifts through memories and revisits journal entries, framing her own specific circumstances within the broader context of France in 1963, when abortion was still punishable by fines or imprisonment, possibly even—for “those physicians, midwives, pharmacists and other individuals guilty of suggesting or encouraging such practices”—by temporary or permanent loss of “the right to exercise their profession.” Ernaux’s breakthrough to a wider readership in English came in 2017 with The Years (translated by Alison L. Strayer, a Canadian), a kind of collective, or generational (rather than personal), memoir of la vie Française between the 1940s and (almost) present day. In writing The Years, Ernaux deliberately avoided use of the first person, choosing instead what she refers to as a “je collectif.” Strayer describes the difficulties this caused her as a translator: “The shifts [between pronouns in the original French] imply that ‘we’ and ‘one’ (that is, nous and on) contain an ‘I’ or a ‘them,’ a ‘her,’ ‘him’ and ‘you,’ a ‘someone’ or ‘some people’—truly collectif!” By means of this simple grammatical device, Ernaux’s deeply-considered recollections—of banalities such as the films “one” watched and the events which occupied “one’s” thoughts at particular points in time—transform an otherwise nondescript and anonymous citizen of France into an archetypal Frenchwoman. In A Girl’s Story (also translated by Strayer), Ernaux revisits the girl she was at eighteen, “her desire and madness, her idiocy and pride, her hunger and her blood that ceased to flow,” during a summer more than fifty years earlier, when “the girl of ’58” was “swept away inside the desire and the will of a single Other.” —H.R. Straw 

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