I suggested to Ernaux that there might be something validating in the present outpouring of loathing. Hadn’t she been writing for years about the contempt of the rich for the poor, of men for women, of the dominant for the downtrodden? “It’s proof,” she agreed. Still, it depressed her. In the uproar, Ernaux saw a renewal of the frightening wave of outrage that had engulfed her ten years ago, when she published a column in Le Monde decrying “A Literary Elegy for Anders Breivik,” a barely concealed apologia for the Norwegian mass murderer by Richard Millet, an author and editor at Gallimard. While condemning Breivik’s crimes, Millet blamed them on multiculturalism and the erosion of European Christian identity; Ernaux called his text “a fascist pamphlet that dishonors literature.” Three days later, Millet stepped down from Gallimard’s prestigious reading committee. Many others shared Ernaux’s disgust—for instance, J. M. G. Le Clézio, Nobelled in 2008. But Ernaux’s column, counter-signed by a hundred and eighteen fellow-writers, was seized upon as a flash point. L’affaire Richard Millet became a kind of referendum on what wasn’t yet termed cancel culture, with Ernaux denounced as a harridan intent on enforcing politically correct censorship at the expense of a man’s career. “I was called a killer,” Ernaux said. She herself felt that “it was really a hallali”—a hunting call, with Ernaux as the chased stag. Blanche proved to be the engine of the marriage, the dreamer and the doer. It was her idea to take over the café-grocery—she was a natural behind the counter—though this was not the end of hard times. The clientele was poor, and often asked for credit; Alphonse worked other jobs to keep the family afloat. Then there was the German Occupation to deal with, and the chaotic scramble of rationing and rebuilding that followed the war. When Annie was five, the family moved to Yvetot and took over another, more profitable café-grocery, living in the rooms upstairs. That is where Ernaux grew up: sleeping with her parents in a single bedroom, using an outdoor toilet, greeting customers with a loud, clear “ Bonjour” while watching, at Blanche’s instruction, to see that they didn’t pinch anything from the shelves. While all these technologies make it easy to keep in touch with family and friends, what I miss are the strangers. Certainly, I have not stayed in London for the weather. I am here for the crowds that spill out onto the pavement, the ladies’ pond in Hampstead Heath, the chaos of Kingsland Road—what Jane Jacobs referred to as “the ballet of the good city sidewalk.” I live in London for its strangers, for the unknown meetings that might take place. In her book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jacobs explained that cities “differ from towns and suburbs in basic ways, and one of these is that cities are, by definition, full of strangers.” Jacobs’ impassioned argument had its weaknesses, particularly its refusal to take the role of race into consideration, but she understood the importance of a density of overlapping lives. Strangers represent chance and the ephemeral. They present endless and magical possibilities.

Graffiti plays an important role throughout the text. Of course, there’s something bleak about a new town already vandalized, but it also signifies verve and humanity. Ernaux does a marvelous job balancing the two and showing that blemishes are a part of life, and should be appreciated as such: “On the walls of the railroad station in Cergy, after the October riots, one could read: ALGERIA I LOVE YOU, with blood-red flowers between ‘Algeria’ and ‘I.’” Ernaux became pregnant in October 1963, after visiting a boyfriend, P., in Bordeaux. She wrote to P. that she ‘had no intention of keeping it’. Doctors couldn’t help because they were in an impossible legal position; she then tried a leftist friend who told her about a friend, LB, who had ‘almost croaked’ during an abortion a few years earlier. The leftist friend then tried to kiss her. Needing an abortion, Ernaux discovered, made her appealing to men. She waited outside the office of the paper LB worked for, Paris-Normandie, but never caught her. She read medical journals for clues. She went to Martainville, ‘a rough, working-class area’ of Rouen, to find a doctor who did abortions, but ended up wandering aimlessly, humming ‘Dominique’, a song by Soeur Sourire that was often on the radio in 1963, a jaunty acoustic guitar-and-voice tune at odds with the despair she felt. But the voice of Soeur Sourire ‘gave me the courage to go on living that afternoon’: Annie Ernaux is one of my favourite contemporary writers, original and true. Always after reading one of her books, I walk around in her world for months.’ If Annie Ernaux were a lesser memoirist, it would be easier to lay out the bare facts of her life. She was born in Normandy in 1940, to parents who worked in factories in Lillebonne before moving to Yvetot to run a café-épicerie, but for a reader it is much easier to remember that they sold hazelnut milk chocolate but no whisky. Her parents had another daughter, Ginette, who died of diphtheria at the age of six, before Ernaux was born. Annie was sent to a private Catholic school, where she was often top of the class. She went to train as a teacher in Rouen, abandoning her studies when she realised her heart wasn’t in it. She then spent six months as an au pair in Finchley, before heading to Bordeaux to work on a PhD on Marivaux. She had an abortion when she was a student, when it was still illegal in France. At university, she met Philippe Ernaux, got married, and had two boys, Eric and David. She returned to teaching, working for 23 years at the Centre National d’Enseignement par Correspondance, a sort of French Open University. The family moved to Cergy-Pontoise, a new town on the end of the RER A, on the north-west edge of Paris. Her father died in 1967 after a short illness. She wrote while her children napped, once the teaching and housework were done.

Exteriors

Instead, one can concentrate on how her heart sinks, how she doesn’t want to be quite so self-centered. In any case, she ends the journal entries with the understanding that just as she might be using other people as props for her stories, so do other people use her for theirs. Thus, she invites this reader to cannibalize her narrative, to see her as a symptom of Frenchness, and to comb it for everyday exclusionary practices. Meditating on myth and morality. First-person and second-person in writing (the former shames the reader- she adds). Pressing on the importance of the connection between a painting and its description, Ernaux—to me it seems—wrote without fear, which is one of the most critical qualities of a writer. Much of what Ernaux transmits—what it is to grow up working class in a society that is contemptuous of workers; what it is to be a woman dispossessed of her body by the laws of the state, or by the overpowering prerogatives of desire—has made her a literary model, even a hero, to those who have shared similar experiences or points of view. Ernaux’s book “ Happening,” in which she describes seeking an illegal abortion as a twenty-three-year-old student, is a feminist touchstone; it was adapted, last year, into a movie by the director Audrey Diwan. Writers like Didier Eribon, Édouard Louis, and Marie NDiaye are openly indebted to Ernaux in both substance and style. Ernaux has been asked if she is proud to have been adopted as a kind of literary godmother, or even as a spokesperson, but she feels that “pride” is the wrong word. “I never wanted to write for,” Ernaux told me. “I write from.” Still, she was moved by the joy with which readers greeted the Nobel announcement. She considered the prize “a collective” achievement.

The book in which these lines appear, “ Shame,” was published in 1997. (The English translation is by Tanya Leslie.) Its opening is unforgettable: “My father tried to kill my mother one Sunday in June, in the early afternoon.” That was in the summer of 1952, when Ernaux was eleven. It took her nearly forty-five years to try to make sense of what this terrifying event meant to her, and, by the book’s end, she is still not sure that she has. “I have always wanted to write the sort of book that I find it impossible to talk about afterward, the sort of book that makes it impossible for me to withstand the gaze of others,” she writes. This paradoxical wish, to reveal the darkest parts of herself with such pitiless accuracy that she will be forced to fall silent once and for all, is an extraordinary expression of writerly ambition. In any case, it has still not come true. Hiába apróka a könyv, nem könnyen fogyasztható. Izgalmas, mert úgy mesél Annie Ernauxról, hogy azt a világ apró rebbenései és a krónikás ezekről alkotott benyomásai mögé rejti, azaz egyáltalán nem személytelen. Szerettem, mert más mint az autofikciói, és egy olyan életbe enged betekintést, amiről én a nyolcvanas években nem is álmodhattam. Annie Ernaux reminds me of Joan Didion. Writing that is confessional, possesses the hunt for clarity, quirky observations, and wit that stays with the reader till the end. The book is at once lyrical and unruly. It’s a story of fleeting encounters, overheard conversations and clear-sighted observations that will make you pay attention to the seemingly ephemeral details of ordinary life.’ There are many things Ernaux does well, but she is unparalleled on desire and love: the full-bodied joy, but also the brutal lows of it. Simple Passion is a sliver of a book that captures the freefall of obsessive love and the manic, mangled why-doesn’t-he-call? time shifts of an affair. Ernaux is superb on the power dynamics and inequality of some relationships.

anonymous figures glimpsed in the Métro or in waiting rooms . . . who revive our memory and reveal our true selves through the interest, the anger or the shame that they send rippling through us." Sexism, economic inequality and classism; Annie Ernaux observes a lot of broader society from overheard metro conversations, from shopping in malls, by visiting galeries and observing life in general around Paris. They think I’m not legitimate,” Ernaux said to me. “What disgusts them is that there are people who have found, in literature, something that speaks to them, and that those people aren’t C.E.O.s or company bosses.” Ernaux is also the first French woman to win the Nobel, “and that doesn’t work for them, at all.” For years, she has dealt with sexist criticism of her work, and not just from the right. After she published “ Simple Passion,” a soul-baring account of a love affair with a married man, a literary critic at the liberal weekly Le Nouvel Observateur took to calling her Madame Ovary.

A woman’s voice, through the loudspeaker, explains the history of April Fools’ Day. Then it announces that today there’s a special on aperitifs and hi-fi equipment. The hypermarket may want to enlighten customers and show that it can play an educational role, or else it’s a commercial ploy to lessen the onslaught of advertising. I n a few years from now, in the middle of hypermarkets, we shall probably see cinema screens, promotional lectures on painting or literature, maybe even lessons on computers. A sort of peep-show corner. For the past few years, Ernaux told me, she has had the sense that she has fulfilled a certain trajectory. “No, not a trajectory. A destiny.” She laughed, but she meant it. “Not a destiny that was written from the beginning. One that was constructed, bit by bit, of course.”

Exteriors contains the first of Ernaux’s journals to be published, and afterwards she began accumulating several different sorts of text around the main emotional events in her life. She didn’t at first think she would publish the account of her visits to her mother in the nursing home, which appeared as I Remain in Darkness, but thought again. ‘I have come round to thinking that the consistency and coherence achieved in any written work – even when its innermost contradictions are laid bare – must be questioned whenever possible.’ Ernaux often wonders aloud about the purpose of her writing: why she writes, who she’s writing for, what she hopes to achieve. In her journals, she lives a problem day to day; in her memoirs she’s able to shape reality, squash time. The image she uses elsewhere is of a horizontal line crossed at intervals by vertical ones of different lengths, like a graph. The books are vertical and the journals are horizontal, and we have access in our lives to both. My Ernaux odyssey continues with the latest republication by the UK publisher Fitzcarraldo Editions. Exteriors was first published in French in 1993 and in English in 1996. It takes the form of random journal entries between 1985 and 1992. I don’t think those years have any especial significance once you know when this was first published.