On Annie Ernaux’s “The Young Man”

“I want to live a fable,” reads the epigraph of Getting Lost (2001; transl. 2022), Annie Ernaux’s published journal entries about her affair with a married Soviet diplomat, whom she refers to only as “S.” The quote is an anonymous inscription from the Basilica Sante Croce in Florence. The journals lay bare Ernaux’s attempts to spin the messy reality of the affair into a fable—a story with meaning and narrative shape.