WHEN I PICKED up my local library’s copy of Nobel Laureate Annie Ernaux’s The Years, I wondered: what are these ‘years’ of which she speaks? The years after World War II? The years of Ernaux’s life (all sixty-eight of them by the time of the book’s publication in 2008)? After reading past the title page, it became clear that these years were a secret third thing. While, technically, the book tracks Ernaux’s life up to the time of writing, it’s not just about her life. Rather, it’s about the lives of everybody who went to Catholic schools, voted for François Mitterrand and ate Nutella between 1940 and 2008.

Ernaux lacks a strong hold on the passage of time. This is not a criticism. Her books, most of which sit somewhere between memoir and autofiction, wouldn’t benefit from concrete, strictly linear representations of time. That isn’t how memory works, and memory is a highly valuable substance in Ernaux’s work. Arguably, The Years is the most linear in this respect, but only for a portion of the book. The first line, ‘All the images will disappear’, fails to reference a specific day, month or even year, aside from the nebulous future conjugation of ‘will’. The subsequent pages reference ‘1990’, ‘the mid-1980s’ and ‘1952’, blending a batch of memories together like juice. The book is a dizzying yet exhilarating thing to read. It jumps in and out of specific eras like the TARDIS from Doctor Who, while also showing the big picture of a generation.

In the second chapter, the first mention of time is ‘1941’, which accompanies the description of someone’s, presumably Ernaux’s, infancy:

A fat baby with a full, pouty lower lip and brown hair pulled up into a big curl sits half-naked on a cushion in the middle of a carved table… In this piece of family archives, which must date from 1941, it is impossible not to read a ritual petit bourgeois staging for the entrance into the world.

Her narrative omniscience pokes through the book’s finale, providing a metaliterary justification for her creative choices in striking third person:

So her book’s form can only emerge from her complete immersion in the images from her memory in order to identify, with relative certainty, the specific signs of the times, the years to which the images belong, gradually linking them to others…

I find the middle of this sentence incongruous with the rest of the book – the images and memories that float throughout The Years feel anything but ‘certain’. However, as I continue my way through the sentence, I can piece together what Ernaux’s trying to tell me. She qualifies ‘certainty’ with ‘relative’. She is not certain at all. Everything she thinks she knows about her own life can come loose at any moment.

IT IS IN A Girl’s Story, Ernaux’s 2016 account of the circumstances leading up to and following the first time she had sex as a teenager, that time as we know it collapses.

A work of autofiction, A Girl’s Story has two protagonists: Annie Duchesne, an innocent seventeen-year-old camp counsellor, and Annie Ernaux, an experienced woman in her seventies. Although the real-life versions of these characters exist in two separate times, in this book they co-exist. Ernaux employs the pronoun ‘I’ in reference to her current self and ‘she’ in reference to her adolescent self. She writes, ‘I too wanted to forget that girl. Really forget her, that is, to stop yearning to write about her.’ The older Annie pops in and out of the book, as if to play fairy godmother to the younger Annie, yet the book retains an emotional core in the middle of these two timelines.

Just as I am about to send Annie Duchesne under the portico and through the door on that day, 14 August 1958, I am overwhelmed by apathy, often a sign that I am about to abandon my writing in the face of difficulties I cannot clearly define…the problem I am up against is how to grasp the behaviour of this girl, Annie D, and how to understand her happiness and suffering in relation to the rules and beliefs of French society half a century ago…

If Doc Brown, the Doctor, or any other beacon of science fiction witnessed Ernaux dipping into her own timeline, they’d be appalled. ‘You’re ripping a hole in the space-time continuum!’ they’d shout. But to Ernaux, the past and present are one and the same, so what’s the harm in mixing them?

AS A WRITER of both fiction and non-fiction, I’m constantly racking my brain for ways to turn a life that is uninteresting to live into one that is interesting to read. Often I rely on stylistic trickery – metaphor, imagery and structural experimentation. Oh my! My ‘method’ with a good chunk of my writing is to reach into my cognition for a memory, squeeze it to a pulp and reshape it into something resembling a story. I am under no illusion that this method is neither unique nor remotely original. I stole it from Annie Ernaux. Her writing has impacted culture to such an extent that she was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, because her work is not just about the here, the now, the ‘I’.

Some of Ernaux’s more illuminating comments on her own writing are in discussion of what she calls the je transpersonnel, primarily in relation to her omission of this very ‘I’ in The Years. In a 2022 interview with Lauren Elkin for The White Review, she explains ‘I say je transpersonnel because it is not the individual, or the anecdotic, that interests me, but that which is shared.’ If segments of time are like individual humans living in a vacuum, with no connection to one other, mashing them together is what fulfils Ernaux’s desire as a writer.

Reading Ernaux’s books is like living in an echo. There you are in the middle of the story, fixating on the ‘I’, and then you bounce into some other part of life where all you see is the je transpersonnel because, in the act of writing, for Ernaux time becomes space. Ironically, in its wateriness, time always ends up solidifying. She says in her White Review interview, ‘it’s very spatial, as if there were two different places that had to be brought together: the place I started from, which has a certain violence, and the world of literature’.

The deeper you dive into Ernaux’s oeuvre, the clearer it becomes that her problematising of time is at its core an attempt to reconcile her past. You can see this throughout 1997’s Shame, the story of how Ernaux’s father attempted to murder her mother and the event’s aftermath. Having witnessed this incident as a child, Ernaux went on to be haunted by it – at her church, at her Catholic school, at every location she went on holiday.

While recounting her primary school years, a period of time that stung with her desire to fit in with the other girls her age, she lists things that in her particular social context were considered ‘bad form’: bringing secular magazines to school, hanging around ‘the girls who attend public school’ and going to the cinema to see a film that her school had ‘banned’. The title of the book references a uniquely social emotion, which in this case spawned from a uniquely antisocial circumstance and latched on like a leech. In Shame, memory bleeds. Then it clots.

Ernaux’s work pushes you into a multiverse where stories melt and memories scream at each other. She writes in Shame, ‘People are forever remembering.’ In a world where her books exist, this is always possible.

Image by Annette, courtesy of Pixabay