Annie Ernaux
Illustration by T.A.

Annie Ernaux: ‘I was so ashamed for Catherine Deneuve…’

The French writer on her singular memoir being longlisted for the Man Booker international prize and why #MeToo has her backing

Kim Willsher

Saturday 6 April 2019

Annie Ernaux, 78, is one of France’s most respected writers, and has won multiple awards for her books, including the 2017 Marguerite Yourcenar prize for her entire body of work. She was largely unknown in the UK until her memoir, Les Années, was published in English (The Years, translated by Alison L Strayer) and made it on to the longlist for this year’s Man Booker international prize (the shortlist will be announced on Tuesday). The book was a bestseller in France and, according to writer John Banville, “blends memories, dreams, facts and meditations into a unique evocation of the times in which we lived, and live”.

 Annie Ernaux photographed at home in Paris last month by Ed Alcock for the Observer New Review.

You have written the book using “one” and “we” and occasionally “she” or “they”, but never “I”, which is unusual even for an impersonal autobiography…

When I think of my life, I see my story since childhood until today, but I cannot separate it from the world in which I lived; my story is mixed with that of my generation and the events that happened to us. In the autobiographical tradition we speak about ourselves and the events are the background. I have reversed this. This is the story of events and progress and everything that has changed in 60 years of an individual existence but transmitted through the “we” and “them”. The events in my book belong to everyone, to history, to sociology.The Years is an account of events and changes over more than half a century in France. Though you mention the impact of world events – the Beatles, the Iraq war, 9/11 – it is from a French perspective. How has the book been received elsewhere? Were you surprised to be nominated for the Man Booker international?

Yes, very surprised. But the book has been well received in Germany and Italy and has been translated into Chinese, so it must have an appeal that is greater than just [as] a history of France. Even if I don’t say it directly, it’s clearly history through an individual life, my life, and through my memory. I am recounting this collective history via my feelings and recollections. The main character is time and its passing, which takes everything with it including our lives.

It is an entirely unsentimental narrative. You reveal very little that is personal: about your family, children, the end of your marriage; you write of sex, but not of love. You mention your mother’s Alzheimer’s, note the look in the eyes of the cat as it is put down, and your jealousy when your former lover finds a younger partner, but the rest is starkly unemotional…
I’m not a writer who focuses on emotions and this is not the subject of The Years. The point is not to speak of the personal. The personal can be gathered through the descriptions of the photos. I fix on a photo [for each decade] and describe the clothes, the light, and place myself in that moment. Through the photos I touch on the death of my father, very briefly, and the children, but I do not speak often of sentiments.

You came from a modest family – your parents ran a small shop – but you went to university. French writers with working-class backgrounds, such as Édouard Louis, have written about how this distanced them from their families…

It was rare, but I was an only child – my sister died before I was born – and because my mother had a strong personality and loved to read, I was pushed. Yes, it put a distance between me and my family. This distancing was the subject of my first book 40 years ago.Of the six decades The Years covers, is there any period you look back on as most interesting, formative or happy?

In terms of collective experience, the period just before 1968, the time of the Beatles, until the 1980s was probably the most interesting. On a personal level, the period that has been the most luminous of my life was between the age of 45 and 60, when I had the impression of really being a free woman doing what I want. It was a time of great liberty for me, when I felt good about life.

And now?
Now I’m getting old. I will be 79 this year and there are always those little health problems and tiredness. There’s a woman in one of Simone de Beauvoir’s last books who says there is a douceur [sweetness] in having a long past behind her. That’s one of the feelings one can have at this age and it’s very positive. The last image in The Years, of a woman pictured with her granddaughter, has some of that softness one has when one ages.

You describe your developing feminism in the book, but also recount the confusion of women of your generation when confronted with marriage and families. How do you feel about feminism today, particularly the #MeToo movement that has had a mixed reception in France, with Catherine Deneuvesaying it’s gone too far?
I was so ashamed for Deneuve when she said what she did… It was the reflection of a group of privileged women. To be honest, I found it… disgusting is the word. I am in absolute agreement with #MeToo. Certainly there are excesses but the important thing is that women don’t accept this kind of behaviour any more. In France we hear so much about our culture of seduction, but it’s not seduction, it’s male domination. The abuse is not just in the sexual domain – it’s present everywhere, including in literature. Female writers are put forward much less for TV programmes, where there are three men for every woman. There’s this idea that a woman is a novelist and a man a writer…

You say you have always been a voracious reader. What books have influenced you?
It’s hard to choose. I read Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch at a time in my life when reading was important and influenced the way I wrote. Jean-Paul Sartre’s La Nausée, Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, and Virginia Woolf, a marvellous writer I discovered in my 20s, and Georges Perec. There are books I wanted to read and then I wanted to write like that. For me, it’s not just about the story and content, but the form.

What books are you reading now?
At the moment I’m reading Lauren Elkin’s Flâneuse: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice, and London. To flâner is such a masculine activity in France and she has appropriated it for women in an interesting way.

• The Years by Annie Ernaux is published by Fitzcarraldo Editions (£12.99). 

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