Born in 1940, Ernaux was brought up in Yvetot in Normandy. She is the only daughter of working-class parents who ran a cafe-cum-grocers, and her childhood was underpinned by class tensions within the family home and outside it. Ernaux attended a private Catholic girls’ school for her secondary education, which fuelled social divisions between her and her parents – in particular her father, which she explores in her fourth publication A Man’s Place. Her first three novels, Cleaned Out, Do What They Say or Else and A Frozen Woman, form a trilogy of autobiographical novels. These works broadly detail the socialisation of a working-class girl who has a middle-class education and then marriage. Her protagonist is a woman who, like so many of Ernaux’s readers, identifies as a “ class defector”.

AnnieNSFW - Reddit AnnieNSFW - Reddit

Some call Ernaux a pioneer of autofiction. Whatever you term it – fiction, memoir, autobiography or, as Deborah Levy has it, living autobiography – it has been a life’s work that has eroded the boundaries between such categories and seen her lauded in France and cemented on school and university curriculums there. In the English-speaking world she is less well known. The small publisher Fitzcarraldo Editions, which also publishes the work of fellow Nobel laureates Svetlana Alexievich and Olga Tokarczuk in translation, has doggedly championed her in a climate that can often be indifferent to literary work in other languages. I imagine it’s a pleasure for her English translators, Tanya Leslie and Alison L Strayer, to work with her clean, almost clinically precise prose which somehow manages to so richly evoke true life. In subsequent works, Ernaux considered fictionalised accounts of her origins a form of betrayal because they ran the risk of exoticising her family and class origins.For cost savings, you can change your plan at any time online in the “Settings & Account” section. If you’d like to retain your premium access and save 20%, you can opt to pay annually at the end of the trial. E.L.: I definitely made this film with the intention to arouse, because that's what I do. It's just another kind of arousal than what we are used to. Most of the XConfessions stories are fictional, but lately, I've been making films in which we get to know real couples and we get to see the kind of sex they have in their ordinary lives. The idea is that these documentaries will show you different ideas around sex, because I think that people — we have so many questions. This approach to writing is underpinned by a mission. Ernaux believes that writing about the self inevitably involves writing about a socio-political context, and thereby extends the representativeness of her own experience. By writing simply about her own experiences, she also wants to write into literature the collective experience of the French working-class.

Annie Ernaux and writing from Nobel prize in literature: Annie Ernaux and writing from

These things happened to me so that I might recount them,” Ernaux continued. “Maybe the true purpose of my life is for my body, my sensations and my thoughts to become writing, in other words, something intelligible and universal, causing my existence to merge into the lives and heads of other people.” And then, perhaps, to become celluloid images projected into a dark theatre, or pixels on a small rectangular screen that hasn’t yet been invented, adapted by a woman who hasn’t yet been born, merging into the lives and heads of those who live in a world where some can and have had legal abortions, and where millions of others still cannot. In terms of the film’s cinematography, Diwan wanted to give a sense of the era without recreating it mimetically. “I asked the art director to create [a version of] the 1960s that would go unnoticed. The costumer was tasked with representing a certain social class without pointing it out. For example all the working-class students were very restricted in terms of what they wore – Annie [Ernaux] told me that – they each have three outfits, all that would fit in the kind of small leather suitcase they would have brought from home to university. That desire to give voice to marginalised experiences is further illustrated in two of her “external diaries”, Exteriors and Things Seen, which record the everyday exchanges of people in outside spaces such as the supermarket or when commuting on the Paris metro. There are more oblique references to the time as well. At the lunch table, the girls debate Camus versus Sartre, “a question of the gaze”. In their literature lecture, the professor reads a poem by Louis Aragon called “Elsa au miroir” (Elsa at Her Mirror), about his wife, Elsa Triolet, “combing her golden hair, as if she enjoyed tormenting her memory”. Anne is called on to give her reading of the poem. “He uses a lover’s drama to evoke a national one. It’s a political poem. For me they’re war references. In 1942, when the poem was published, Elsa Triolet and Aragon were communists. So I think they both hope for a patriotic awakening.” With this reading, Anne reframes what seems like a private concern as a public one.

The word abortion isn’t uttered once. The idea was to focus on her body, not the setting – so that we’re not watching Anne but become her Audrey Diwan

Annie Ernaux ‘It plunged me back to waiting for a period’: Annie Ernaux

Art brings to light – makes exist – reality unhinged from its contingencies, its dispersal into particular existences. A painting, a book, or a film that depicts an abortion ‘puts something into the world’: it’s no longer something personal, hidden, or only a women’s problem, but that it concerns all of humanity.This neutral way of writing comes to me naturally, it is the very same style I used when I wrote home telling my parents the latest news. Diwan herself describes feeling at first “joyful” about having the term applied to her work, but that more recently she’s had the impression that her gaze has been “circumscribed” by her gender, that as a director she was “reduced to and defined by” her gender. No sooner had she accepted the mantle of the female gaze than she was “limited” by it.

Elena Koshka in Pure Taboo Elena Koshka in Pure Taboo

I have finished putting into words what I consider to be an extreme human experience, hearing on life and death, time, law, ethics and taboo ‒ an experience that sweeps through the body.It’s cheering to see Ernaux’s genius and her fearlessness acclaimed by the Nobel committee. The daughter of parents who owned a cafe-cum-grocery shop, she has something in common with Elena Ferrante in her reflections on social class and education and the gulfs they can create. Her work echoes the experiences of many women of her generation who sought liberation through learning and creativity. We are made of words, she told one interviewer (in French); they travel through us. That is how it feels to read her, too. Audrey Diwan after winning the Golden Lion award for Happening at the Venice film festival last year. Photograph: Sipa US/Alamy Ernaux’s acute awareness of the formative influence of class underpins her entire body of work and in the wake of her win, many in France praised her work for its ongoing focus on the French working-class experience. Flat writing