The Year I Tore Through Annie Ernaux’s Books
Reading the work of the newly minted Nobel Prize laureate, one novelist discovered the kind of writer she wanted to be.
When I was living in Paris in 2018, a friend passed Annie Ernaux’s book to me as if it were an envelope containing treasure. The memoir tells the story of the abortion Ernaux had in 1963, when the procedure was , and, like nearly all of her books, it is an excavation of memory, of self, of the powers and the limits of writing. In its most climactic scene, the narrator, a college student, expels what looks like a “baby doll” from her body “like a
