“All the images will disappear”: Memory and Existence in Annie Ernaux’s “The Years”

Over the past few weeks, I’ve started to read more works by French writers, including Leïla Slimani’s Adèle and Elisa Shua Dusapin’s Winter in Sokcho. To expand my reading, I asked individuals for other recommendations of female French writers, and one person suggested that I read Annie Ernaux. At the person’s suggestion, I went to the stacks in my library and pulled down a copy of Ernaux’s 2008 memoir The Years, a book that reads, in many ways, more like a novel than a memoir. In fact, as I read it, I kept thinking about it as a novel, not as a memoir about Ernaux’s life and the personal and cultural moments that impacted it. Reading The Years, I also thought about it in relation to works such as Magda Szabó’s The Fawn, Helen Weinzweig’s Basic Black with Pearls, and Olga Tokarczuk’s Flights, specifically in relation to Ernaux’s style over the course of the memoir.

Two recurring themes throughout Ernaux’s memoir concern memory and our role in the historical arc of time. Ernaux contemplates the memories we hold within us, the stories we tell ourselves and others, and the ways that stories, one day, will disappear, just as we, one day, will cease to physically exist as history continues on without us. Ernaux centers these themes with the two epigraphs she provides from José Ortega y Gasset and Anton…