Annie Ernaux

The thing most forbidden, the one we’d never believed possible, the contraceptive pill became legal. We didn’t dare ask the doctor for a prescription and the doctor didn’t offer, especially if one wasn’t married – that would be indecent. We strongly sensed that with the pill, life would never be the same again. We’d be so free in our bodies it was frightening. Free as a man.

‘I’m afraid of settling into this quiet and comfortable life, and afraid to have lived without being aware of it’

harles Piaget, the factory worker from Lip, was better known than the psychologist of the same name whom our teachers had harped on about in Philosophy class [never suspecting that one day, the name Piaget would mean nothing to us but a luxury jeweller advertised in magazines at the hairdresser’s].

They brought back embroidered blouses and raki. They wanted the world to always have countries devoid of progress to take them back in time this way.

Unlike adolescence, when she was sure of not being the same from one year or even one month to the next, now she feels immutable in a world that moves ahead in leaps and bounds

here is no ‘I’ in what she views as a sort of impersonal autobiography. There is only ‘one’ and ‘we’, as if now it were her turn to tell the story of the time-before.

The experience of living simultaneously on the inside and outside of your own body is very particular to the female experience I think – and not only in relation to pregnancy but in myriad other ways too. I like the measured, unforgiving way she works her way through the logic, or illogic, of that. I find her work extraordinary.’

One thing more,” she said. “I’m not ashamed of anything I’ve done. There’s nothing to be ashamed of in loving a person and saying so.”
It was not true. The shame of her surrender, her letter, her unrequited love would go on gnawing, burning, till
the end of her life. (…)
After all, it did not seem to hurt much: certainly not more than could be borne in secret, without a sign. It had all been experience, and that was a salutary thing. You might write a book now, and make him one of the characters; or take up music seriously; or kill yourself.’

I started to make a literary being of myself, someone 136who lives as if her experiences were to be written down someday.

they are swept away inside the desire and the will of a single Other. Everything they believed about themselves vanishes. They dissolve and watch a reflection of themselves act, obey, swept into a course of events unknown. They trail behind the will of the Other,