Writing, the Other Life

WINNER OF THE 2022 NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE

For fans new to Annie Ernaux and longtime readers, this collection of interviews, writing by critics and journalists, with diary excerpts and unpublished texts by Ernaux herself, also includes visual material like drawings, photos, and newspaper clippings.

Magisterial in scope and size, Writing, The Other Life was compiled and edited by Pierre-Louis Fort and was first published in France by Éditions de L'Herne in 2022, a few months before she received the Nobel Prize in Literature. The anthology includes twenty-four previously unpublished Ernaux pieces, as well as literary criticism, essays, interviews, diary entries, e song by Jeanne Cherhal, newspaper clippings, a comic strip by Aurélia Aurita, letters from Simone de Beauvoir.

Never before published in English, this beautifully visual collection includes an 8-page color photo insert with images, handwritten manuscript pages, and drawings sprinkled throughout. It is the fruit of collaboration between six celebrated translators and a groundbreaking work of scholarship and rumination.

PIERRE-LOUIS FORT is a professor at CY Cergy Paris University. He is a specialist in 20th and 21st century French literature, and is also the author of essays including Critique et Littérature (Paris, 2008) and Simone de Beauvoir (Paris, 2016). He edited this book, which was published in 2022 in France as Cahier de L'Herne Annie Ernaux.


The author of some twenty works of fiction and memoir, ANNIE ERNAUX is considered by many to be France’s most important writer. In 2022, she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. She has also won the Prix Renaudot for A Man's Place and the Marguerite Yourcenar Prize for her body of work. More recently she received the International Strega Prize, the Prix Formentor, the French-American Translation Prize, and the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation for The Years, which was also shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize. Her other works include Exteriors, A Girl's Story, A Woman's Story, The Possession, Simple Passion, Happening, I Remain in Darkness, Shame, A Frozen Woman, A Man's Place, and The Young Man.



ROS SCHWARTZ has translated a wide range of Francophone literary fiction, memoirs, nonfiction and literature for children and young adults. In 2009 she was awarded the distinction of Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres for her services to literature. SOPHIE LEWIS is a translator and an editor working from French and Portuguese, and her translations have been shortlisted for the Scott Moncrieff and Republic of Consciousness prizes, and longlisted for the International Booker Prize. FRANK WYNNE is an Irish writer and translator and he chaired the jury of the 2022 Booker International. He has won numerous awards, and most recently his translation of The Art of Losing won the 2022 Dublin Literary Award. ALISON L. STRAYER is a Canadian writer and translator. Her work has been shortlisted for the Governor General’s Award for Literature and for Translation, the Grand Prix du livre de Montréal, and the Prix littéraire France-Québec. Translator EMMA RAMADAN is based in Providence, Rhode Island, where she co-owns Riffraff Bookstore and Bar. She's the recipient of an NEA fellowship, a Fulbright grant, and the 2018 Albertine Prize. DAN SIMON is founder and publisher of Seven Stories Press. His prior translations from the French include Van Gogh: Self Portraits, with accompanying letters from Vincent to his brother Theo by Pascal Bonafoux, and, with Carol Volk, Post-Impressionists by Guy Cogeval.

Table of Contents
 
Pierre-Louis Fort
            Foreword

Jeanne Cherhal
            I am reading / read you[MOU1]


I
“To avenge my people” (Translated by Alison Strayer)
 
Annie Ernaux
The Tree, 1963 – unpublished
Poems of youth –1962
 
ARCHIVE: The opening of a novel written in seventh grade
 
 
Annie Ernaux
Vocation?, 1999
Writing (I), unpublished excerpts from the journal, 1963-1985
Simone de Beauvoir
Letter, 1974
Jean Roudaut
Postcard, 1974
Simone de Beauvoir
Letter, 1977
Benoîte Groult
Letter, 1981
Annie Ernaux
The Place of the Reader, 1997
Pierre-Louis Fort
A “Place” Apart
Dominique Barbéris
An Art in this Openly Asserted Absence of Art
Nicola Lagioia
A Man’s Place: Reparation and Betrayal

ARCHIVE: Manuscript of La Place (A Man’s Place) and facsimile of the list of possible titles
 
Annie Ernaux
“Because the book I write about her must be beautiful or not at all.”
 1986 – unpublished
Pierre Desproges
Letter
Patrice Robin
“Truth and Advice”


II
“To Give Form Through Writing” (Translated by Emma Ramadan)
 
Annie Ernaux
Words Like Stains, 1998-1999 – unpublished
Isabelle Desesquelles
The Fabric of Time
Maya Lavault
Towards and Against Proust
Annie Ernaux
On Proust, 1983-1988 – unpublished
A Prize, 2017
Kyo, 1999; 2006 – unpublished
Annie Ernaux and Frédéric-Yves Jeannet
“Who is this me who travels?” – unpublished interview
Barbara Havercroft
“I’m no fucking plumber!”: Annie Ernaux and Feminisim
Hélène Gestern
We Don’t Write Alone



III
Happening (Translated by Sophie Lewis)

Geneviève Brisac
Happening, Or Twenty Years Later
Nathalie Kuperman
The Dinner
Françoise Gillard
“I Shall Remember”
Annie Ernaux
On Happening, 2000
 
 
IV
Cinema, Photography, Theatre (Translated by Emma Ramadan)
 
Film
Danielle Arbid
Annie, A Punk
Annie Ernaux
“Write” (II), diary extracts, 1991 – unpublished
Anne Coudreuse
The Me in the Mirror
Audrey Diwan
Annie Ernaux – Justness

Photography
Dominique Cabrera
With the Leica
Annie Ernaux
“I Have Cancer in My Right Breast,”  2002-3 – unpublished
Aurélia Aurita
The Uses of Drawing
Isabelle Roussel-Gillet
Facing Photographs, with Annie Ernaux
Annie Ernaux
“The Stunners” – a Drawing: ‘Les Femmes Qui Rient’ (‘The Laughing Women’) by Mylène Besson
 
Theatre
Jeanne Champagne
Finding the Form
Dominique Blanc
Joy and Courage


V
The Years (Translated by Alison Strayer)

Annie Ernaux
The third millennium, 1999 – unpublished
Birthday, 2002 – unpublished
Delphine de Vigan
The Book of a Lifetime
Annie Ernaux and Bernard Desportes
Epistolary dialogues about The Years (December 2007 – February 2008)
Bruno Blanckeman
Du romanesque malgré tout
Annie Ernaux
Writing (III), diary extracts, 2001-7 – unpublished
Alison L. Strayer
Translating The Years: a question of breath


VI
Geographies (Translated by Ros Schwartz)
 
Annie Ernaux
Yvetot, 1968-2005 – unpublished
Annecy, 1998 – unpublished
Rouen, 2000 – unpublished
Michelle Porte and Pierre-Louis Fort
“Writing that inhabits the other, truly, completely” – unpublished interview
Joëlle Pagès-Lindon
“Words As Stones”
Lauren Elkin
The City and the Suburb: the “extimate” diaries of Annie Ernaux
Régis Sauder
I Have Loved Living Here. Writing a screenplay with Annie Ernaux
Annie Ernaux
Speech Given at the University of Cergy-Pontoise, 2014 – unpublished
Tiphaine Samoyault
The New Town

ENGLAND
Élise Hugueney-Léger
The Life of Annie Ernaux’s Writings
Annie Ernaux and Lyn Thomas
“English literature was my real gateway into England” – unpublished interview
Annie Ernaux
I turned twenty in Finchley, a London suburb – unpublished
 
TRAVELS
Annie Ernaux
“America day by day,” 1990 – unpublished
Austria, Slovakia, Romania, 1993, 1998 – unpublished
Egypt, 1994 – unpublished
Korea, 1994 – unpublished
Venice, 1982-2009 – unpublished
 
 
VII
A Girl’s Story (Translated by Alison Strayer)

Isabelle Charpentier
Readings of  A Girl’s Story
Fabrice Thumerel
An Other (Memory): a Girl’s/ Girls’ Stories
Annie Ernaux
“Writing” (IV), excerpts from the journal, 2008-2012
 
 
VIII
The Real Without Me and Within (Translated by Frank Wynne)
 
Auto-Socio-Biography
Françoise Simonet-Tenant
Annie Ernaux and emancipation, or how to find one’s place?
Gisèle Sapiro
An Ethnography of Symbolic Violence
Ivan Jablonka
I, She, We
Nicolas Mathieu
The Most Appropriate, Most Succint Words
Annie Ernaux
Bourdieu: The grief, 2002
“It was something I had to do, a debt,” 2002 – unpublished
 
School, Teaching and Religion
Annie Ernaux
The Exam, 1971 – unpublished
Véronique Jacob
Annie Ernaux, a ‘classic’ of the classroom.
Annie Ernaux
French Class, 2011
Nathalie Froloff
The Empty Tomb: Religion in the Work of Annie Ernaux

“Within and Without”
Annie Ernaux
The External Life (further), 2000-2001
Alexandre Gefen
Annie Ernaux,Politics
Aurélie Adler
A Girl’s Story: Writing in / with the Gaps of History
Annie Ernaux
With the Smile of Saint-Just, 1988
Europe and the Freedom of Women, 2016
May 1st, Imposter Altert! 2012
Lila, Soror, 2019
Politics and Society, 1981-2013 – unpublished

IX
New Enquiries / Openings / Overtures (Translated by Dan Simon)
 
Annie Ernaux
The Formentor Prize, 2019
Annie Ernaux
The Memories of Rooms and Other Places, 1989-1998 – unpublished
Annie Ernaux and Pierre-Louis Fort
‘It’s the books that live, not me’ – unpublished interview
 
 
A Timeline

Contributors