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“... feeling, but to history, we are two dates engraved in stone, if we’re lucky.It was the death of Annie Ernaux’s father that prompted her to write memoir (her previous three books had been novels), as if the assumptions and structures of fiction crumbled when she wanted to recuperate someone she loved from the mass of history. But writing about her ...”

“... when compared to the portraiture methods of, say, Philip Roth (in his Zuckerman novels) or Annie Ernaux, who, in The Years, describes the life of a woman of her generation as if she were a concave mirror, able to capture, from the very edge of vision, the lives of all her contemporaries thronging round her. ...”

“... lived in the “ville nouvelle” for twelve years and I don’t know what it looks like,’ Annie Ernaux writes in Journal de dehors of Cergy-Pontoise. ‘I can’t describe it either, not knowing where it starts and ends, always driving around … No descriptions, no stories either. Just moments, encounters.’ Although they were designed to ...”

“... of his new identity as class renegade appears to continue the tradition of French writers like Annie Ernaux, in her trio of slim autobiographical novels, and, especially, Didier Eribon (to whom The End of Eddy is dedicated), whose influential memoir Retour à Reims involves a now celebrated writer revisiting the tough working-class childhood in which ...”

“... her cervix to set off uterine contractions, and now she has to wait. We are on the first page of Annie Ernaux’s first novel, Les Armoires vides, and we are going to have to wait with her. In pregnancy, quickening refers to the first movements of the foetus in the womb, but here we are waiting for a death, and as we turn the pages of the novel and get ...”

“... first chapter, in which Bennett learns how not to spoil books by not reading them, is taken from Annie Ernaux’s A Girl’s Story: ‘One cannot see the future of something learned.’ The rangy first-person plural of Bennett’s opening (‘we could wonder couldn’t we’ … leading to that snagging ‘ourself’) could put us in mind of the ...”

“... is no longer forbidden, that I can now … face, in its reality, this unforgettable event,’ Annie Ernaux writes in L’Événement, her implacable novel-memoir about what it was actually like to get pregnant and have an illegal abortion in France in 1963 (the novel has now been made into an unsparing film by Audrey Diwan). In France at the time, it ...”