A fascinating and unpublished correspondence.
A moving correspondence, beginning in 1998, while Annie Ernaux was still teaching French at the Cned’s distance-learning center, preparing students for the Capes in modern literature. The letters touch on both literary and private matters, shedding light on many aspects of Ernaux’s novels, and form a coherent and important body of material for understanding her work.
The correspondence begins just as Annie Ernaux is ending a love affair with a student in Rouen thirty years her junior — a passion which, by her own account, she “had never before experienced from a lover. With my husband, long ago, I felt like a working-class girl; with him, this time, I was the bourgeoise […] If I do not write them down, things have not gone to their conclusion, they have only been lived.”
She would return to this episode in Le Jeune Homme, published a few months before receiving the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2022; she had already sketched it in L’Événement in 2000: “I undertook the account of this abortion, around which I had circled for a long time. The further I advanced in writing of this event, which had taken place even before he was born, the more irresistibly I felt driven to leave A. As though I wanted to detach him and expel him, as I had done with the embryo more than thirty years before.” Le Jeune Homme begins precisely where L’Événement ends.
Accompanied by a large signed photograph of Annie Ernaux.