‘We are made of words’: the radically intimate writing of Annie Ernaux
Oct 07, 2022
4 minutes
‘These things happened to me so that I might recount them,” Annie Ernaux writes in Happening, her slim retelling of the clandestine abortion she had in the 1960s, when the procedure was still illegal in France. “Maybe the true purpose of my life is for my body, my sensations and my thoughts to become writing. In other words, something intelligible and universal, causing my existence to merge into the lives and heads of other people.”
I felt a thrill when I first read these words. A greater rationale for autobiographical writing has perhaps never been asserted, at least not so poetically and politically. For
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