The Super 8 Years

The abiding subjects of the French writer Annie Ernaux are memory and time, or, more specifically, how the passing of the latter shapes the recalling of the former. Born in 1940, Ernaux has intermittently kept a diary since she was sixteen. These journals have often been repurposed in her twenty-three books to date (the first was published in 1974), nearly all of which are informed by first-person recollections. But her “I” is usually detached, at a remove. Ernaux has described her own work as “impersonal autobiography,” records of the self that are also more broadly reflections on a specific era.