Annie Ernaux still feels like an outsider

At 86, Annie Ernaux remains committed to writing and political engagement, which she sees as inseparable: both require a truthful account of lived reality. In discussing protests against austerity, she argues that France’s government has ignored young people while giving farmers prompt attention, and that students, workers and Yellow Vest supporters joining forces could bridge divisions that weakened the protests of 1968. She condemns police violence against young demonstrators as normalized and increasingly authoritarian, warning that repression obscures the social conditions of people labeled rioters. Ernaux also describes her support for Palestine and the left-wing France Unbowed party, and fears a far-right government taking power. Speaking at a large campaign rally, she experienced the rare feeling of belonging, despite her enduring sense of herself as an outsider.

The newly translated collection Writing, the Other Life brings together letters, interviews, essays and diary entries that trace Ernaux’s work and its development. A youthful vow to write “for” her working-class community, she explains, meant bearing witness to a background often excluded from literature - not elevating herself as an exceptional individual. Her aim is to reveal what is collective within personal experience. She recalls the decades spent finding the form for The Years, which joins private memory with shared history, and says diaries expose the inquiry and consciousness behind her books. Ernaux rejects the label “autofiction”: her writing may experiment with literary form, but its governing commitment is to reality, including the reality of how memory and self-understanding change over time.