Annie Ernaux / A Memoirist Who Mistrusts Her Own Memories

 

Annie Ernaux

A Memoirist Who Mistrusts Her Own Memories

In the course of twenty books, Annie Ernaux has devoted herself to the excavation of her own life.

By Madeleine Schwartz
April 13, 2020

A young woman has her first sexual experience. She is pleased to be desired by someone. She does not feel humiliated. But, later, she is mocked, tormented by others who believe that she has debased herself. Those whom she thought of as her friends now treat her like nothing. She feels shame. Is the shame hers? Or is it a reflection of what is expected of her?

Vivian Gornick / Sex is the killer

Vivian Gornick

VIVIAN GORNICK

"Sex is the killer"

“We knew we were not liberated and were never going to be liberated. But we knew what liberation was. It was to feel centered in yourself. To feel you were the agent of your life—you were not sitting by the telephone waiting for something to happen.”

Born in 1935 in the Bronx to Jewish leftwingers, Vivian Gornick grew up torn between the simplicity of radical politics and the complexity of literature. “One day,” she writes in her 2008 collection of critical essays, The Men in My Life, “It was exciting to say to myself, ‘the only reality is the system.’ The next, I’d pick up Anna Karenina, and the sole reality of the system would do a slow dissolve.”