Published by folio, 2008, 254 pages. Published in English as The Years, Seven Stories Press, 2017. Translated from French by Alison L. Strayer.

 “All the images will disappear. …
“—all the twilight images of the early years, the pools of light from a summer Sunday, images from dreams in which the dead parents come back to life, and you walk down unidentifiable roads …
“—the images, real or imaginary, that follow us all the way to sleep
“—the images of a moment, bathed in a light that is theirs alone
“They will vanish all at the same time, like the millions of images that lay behind the foreheads of the grandparents, dead for half a century, and of the parents, also dead. Images in which we appeared as a little girl in the midst of beings who died before we were born, just as in our own memories our small children are there next to our parents and schoolmates.
“And one day we’ll appear in our children’s memories, among their grandchildren and people not yet born. Like sexual desire, memory never stops. It pairs the dead with the living, real with imaginary beings, dreams with history.”[1]

Les années is Annie Ernaux’s ode to memory, to images that will one day disappear, as if by putting them into words she will pin them down forever. It is also a sort of collective history, what she calls an “impersonal autobiography”. It layers her life—from her childhood in the 1940s to 2006—with historical events, creating a brief social history of France and the world over 70 years.

The photographs of Ernaux at key points in her life are the device that links the book, each described in detail, ending with a date and place that situates it. Interspersed between these descriptions are listings of events of the time.

Ernaux was born into a working-class Catholic family in a small French town. The first photograph we are shown (in a manner of speaking) is a sepia image of a pouty baby sitting on a cushion. “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.” And we follow her through the years until the last photo, one of her as a grandmother, holding her granddaughter in her lap.

The years in between encapsulate a life: university, marriage, children, divorce, career, lovers, illness, old age—and the birth of her first grandchild, the beginning of a new generation and the continuance of the cycle of life. She gets the news of her son’s partner’s pregnancy just as she is undergoing chemotherapy for breast cancer, and is disconcerted by the feeling that she will be replaced quickly by this new life.

Through these photographs of herself at various stages of her life, Ernaux also bears witness to the seismic changes of the last 70 years: changes in societal attitudes, in politics, in technology and in the position of women. The first photograph is a sepia print while the last is a digital image.

When I started reading the book, I wasn’t sure whether I was enjoying it. Initially, I got the impression that I was being taken on a whistle-stop tour of the last few decades: the end of the Second World War, the war in Algeria, the election of François Mitterrand as French President, the moon landings, the student uprising of May 1968, the pill, technology and so on.

But the whole builds up into a book about memory, of being part of something much larger than an individual. It is the life and times of one woman, but it is also the life and times of everywoman. The impersonal approach is emphasized by the fact that Ernaux never uses “I”—it is always either “we” or “she”, which heightens the feeling of a shared history rather than the detailed story of one woman.

The book feels like a much-loved scrapbook, a collection of souvenirs from a well-lived life, an evocation of the past. My experience in reading it was that it crept up on me, gently pulling me in. And it was a reminder of just how much has changed within the last century.

As Ernaux herself describes it, “This will not be a work of remembrance in the usual sense, aimed at putting a life into story, creating an explanation of self. She will go within herself only to retrieve the world, the memory and imagination of its bygone days, grasp the changes in ideas, beliefs and sensibility, the transformation of people and subject that she has seen… It will be a slippery narrative composed in an unremitting continuous tense, absolute, devouring the present as it goes.”

Annie Ernaux was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2022 for “for the courage and clinical acuity with which she uncovers the roots, estrangements and collective restraints of personal memory”. Les Années is a perfect example of that, a book not just about memory, but about how we remember.

It is personal and universal at the same time, and unlike any memoir that I have read.

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[1] Quotes in English are taken from Alison L. Strayer’s translation of the book, which I accessed on the Internet Archive (https://archive.org/details/years0000erna/mode/2up).