How She Sees Herself

You can’t deny that the pleasures of reading an acclaimed author’s diary — bound and copyedited and available for purchase to anyone with $18.95 — are closely analogous to the pleasures of snooping. This is doubly true when the events of the diary have already been transformed into fiction. Annie Ernaux’s latest book to be translated into English, Getting Lost, is an apparently faithful reproduction of the diary she kept during the affair that inspired her 1992 autobiographical novel, Simple Passion. The novel is an act of artistry. The diary is a scabbed-over wound.