For decades, French author Annie Ernault has analyzed the most humiliating, private, and scandalous moments of her past with near-clinical accuracy.
On Thursday, she won one of literature’s highest honors, the Nobel Prize. Hernaud’s writings speak specifically to women and, like her, those from working-class backgrounds who are rarely explicitly portrayed in literature. She grew up in a small town in Normandy, had an illegal abortion in the 1960s, a discontented family life and a passionate extramarital affair.
It was a remarkable choice by the Nobel Prize committee to recognize a writer whose work is woven from highly personal and often mundane experiences. Mats Her Malm, secretary general of the Swedish Academy, which decides on the awards, announced the decision at a press conference in Stockholm, calling it “a courageous and courageous way for her to reveal the roots of her personal memory, estrangement and collective constraints.” “Clinical acuity” was praised.
Ernaud, 82, pledged to continue writing at a press conference at the Paris office of publisher Galimard. “Winning a Nobel Prize is an ongoing responsibility for me,” she said.
She especially felt compelled to continue examining the inequalities and struggles facing women. “My state as a woman doesn’t make me feel like we women are equal in freedom and power,” she said.
Ernault is the 17th woman to receive the prize, which has been awarded to 119 writers since its inception in 1901. She is her second woman in three years since American poet Louise Gluck won her 2020s award. Award.
Earlier in his career, Ernaud wrote autobiographical fiction, but soon dropped the pretense of conspiracy and began writing memoirs, though he considered his work to be either fiction or non-fiction. Crabs often resisted categorization.
“Everything she writes, every word she says, is literal and factually true,” said Dan Simon, founder of Seven Stories Press, which has published Erno in English for 31 years. Yet these are works of tremendous imagination.”
The experiences she wrote about in the 1980s and 1990s—her ambivalent feelings about unwanted pregnancies and abortions, her affairs, and marriage and motherhood—are considered shocking by some social conservatives. However, it resonated with a wide range of readers.
Ernault describes his writing as a political act, intended to expose deep-seated social inequalities, and likens his use of language to a “knife.” She was influenced by Simone de Beauvoir, the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, and her May 1968 social turmoil, which lasted several weeks of demonstrations, strikes and civil unrest in France. She describes her own prose as “brutally direct, working-class, and sometimes obscene.”
She often placed her personal experiences and memories within the context of French culture and society, drawing parallels between her life and the more universal struggles of women and working-class people. rice field. Her work captures the moment of intense social change in France, moving away from traditional Catholic values and towards more secular, tolerant and sexually liberating practices.
“When she started working, the way she put herself and her life at the center of the big issues of social change in France was very difficult for the ruling class,” she said at New York University. “For the literary world, a working-class woman from northern France shouldn’t be, but she still puts herself in a very powerful position. I would like to.”
Ernaud was born in 1940 and grew up in a working-class Catholic family in Yvette, a small Normandy town where his parents had a grocery store and café. Her father was violent and abusive and saw him try to kill her mother when she was 12 years old. She writes about the event with shocking candor in her “Shame.” early afternoon,” reads her first line.
She tried writing in college, but the publisher rejected her book as “too ambitious,” she told The New York Times in 2020. French teacher.
That effort led to his 1974 debut, Cleaned Out. This novel is a deeply autobiographical novel, worked in secret from her husband, who disrespected her writing. After she sold her book to her prominent publisher, Galimard, her husband was furious that she hid the project by pretending she was working on her doctorate. paper. Her marriage fell apart shortly after the publication of her third book, The Frozen Woman, in 1981, exploring her discomfort with marriage and motherhood. After her divorce, Ernault never remarried, she said, preferring the freedom of living alone.
She achieved widespread commercial success in 1992 when she released a book, Simple Passion, in France detailing a relationship with a married foreign diplomat. She infuriated social conservatives with her brutal portrayal of female desire, but struck the sympathy of her readers with her candid portrayal of her sexual longings without her moral approval. called. This book sold her 200,000 copies in her first two months.
“Men and women confided in me and told me they wished they had written that book,” Ernaud told The Times in 2020.
Ernaud frequently examined and revisited the same events in his life from different angles. Her 2000 memoir, The Happening, in which she articulates that she had an abortion as a college student in 1963, was the first significant event she attempted to capture in fiction, and ” Featured in “Cleaned Her Out”. After documenting her relationship with a diplomat in “Simple Passion”, she later released a volume titled “Getting Lost”, when she released a diary containing entries from 1988 to 1990. I got an unfiltered glimpse of that relationship.
The Times critic Dwight Garner, in his review of the book, wrote, “The almost primal directness of her voice lends tension.” “It’s as if she were carving each sentence on the surface of the table with a knife.”
It took her decades to write about one of the most painful events of her life — a confused sexual experience she had when she was eighteen in the summer of 1958 that left her It made me feel ashamed and abandoned, leading to depression and an eating disorder. “I am endowed with a vast memory of shame, a gift that is more detailed, vengeful, and unique to shame than anyone else,” she wrote in that memoir, A Girl’s Story.
Scholars, critics, and fellow writers have admired her work for the way it connects individual memories with collective experience, especially for women and members of the working class. said Edouard Louis, a French writer and author of The End of the Vortex.
“She achieved a very significant formal revolution in literature, away from metaphors, beautiful writing and characters,” said Lewis, writing about her own working-class roots. “Annie Ernault didn’t try to fit into existing definitions of literature or beauty. She came up with her own definition.”
Ernault has long been admired in France and has been widely translated for decades, but it wasn’t until her memoir “The Years” was shortlisted for the 2019 International Booker Prize that she remained in the English-speaking world. was not very well known in As both Ernault’s account of her experiences and a memoir of a post-war French generation, it captures her transition to sexual emancipation and consumerism.
This is an autobiography unlike any you’ve ever read. You might call it a collective autobiography,” Edmund White wrote in The New York Times.
Fans of Ernaud say one of the things that makes her work so extraordinary is the mediocrity of the experiences she documents. She writes about the boredom of her marriage and motherhood, the confusion and contradiction of her first sexual experiences, and the sadness of seeing her aging parents fade away.
“Her tone is very unemotional, even when talking about very difficult subjects,” said author Francine Prose, who has been reading Ernaud’s work for decades. “I can’t think of anyone like her. It’s not autofiction, not her memoir, strictly speaking. It’s almost as if she invented and perfected her own genre.”
Ernault has long been a favorite of the Nobel Prize, which is awarded to a writer for all his work, with a prize of 10 million Swedish kronor, or about $911,000. Past winners include Toni Morrison, JM Coetzee and even Bob Dylan.
The Swedish Academy said before Thursday’s announcement that 95 of the past 118 Nobel laureates were European or North American, and only 16 were women, before the authors to be considered. tried to increase the diversity of
Anders Olsson, chairman of the Academy’s Nobel Committee, defended the choice of another European author at a press conference on Thursday, saying there was a shortage of female laureates. “
For Ernaud, memories and personal experiences are not to be dug up and written down once, but always to be revisited and reinterpreted.
“For me, writing was, and still is, a way of shedding light on what one feels but is unclear about,” she said at a press conference. “Writing is the path to knowledge. “
Elizabeth A. Harris Contributed a report from New York.