At a 2021 study day devoted to her work at the National Library of France, an audience member in the packed auditorium asked Annie Ernaux — the author of over a dozen mainly autobiographical books — what had made her write her radically frank account of a consuming love affair, Simple Passion (1991). Her answer combined the straightforwardness and vulnerability which defines her style: “Well, passion,” Ernaux responded, with a casual shrug of her shoulders. She offered no further explanation. Getting Lost, published in French in 2001 but translated into English earlier this year, is a series of diary entries and the source material for Simple Passion.

Ernaux, who at the beginning of October was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature, has always maintained a rigorous anti-pretentiousness with regards to her long, increasingly esteemed, writing career. Born to working-class parents in a humble town in Normandy in 1940, the aim of her writing has been to record lives rarely represented in bourgeois literary culture. Her books, which she refuses to label as either fiction or nonfiction, take as their subject the lives of ordinary people as they unfold in supermarkets, on commuter trains, and in doctors’ waiting rooms rather than the upper-middle-class cafés of Paris-Saint-Germain.

In another respect, too, Ernaux’s work has violated some of the conventions of her contemporaries (the “new novelists” Nathalie Sarraute and Marguerite Duras): she has attempted to make her writing useful to her reader — an unusual concern in a French literary world dominated by aesthetes obsessed with the idea of art for art’s sake. Instead, her writing is a tool to help readers feel less alienated by attempting to describe class and sex in ways that hold together structure and subjective experience.