The Years is a unique memoir, for it is not just the story of a single individual, but rather of a whole generation,  particularly its women. It traverses the years 1940-2006 and tells of their humble beginnings in a conservative peasant family and of all the changes they lived through; everything from the cold war and the sexual revolution, to the internet and the 9/11 terrorist attacks. It manages to be both incredibly personal and, if not exactly universal, then at least broadly representative of white women of Ernaux's generation. There's a mix of the political - the war in Algeria and French presidential elections - and the personal -  abortion, breast cancer, divorce, and retirement. The writing was, as expected from a Nobel Prize winner, superb. I loved the reflections on photographs and all the references to cultural touchstones like books, television programmes, brand names, and advertising slogans. The combination of the detached third person "she" and the collective "we", and the way these expanded the traditional conception of a memoir made this a memorable reading experience. 

This unusual memoir follows Annie Ernaux and her peers from the 1940s up until the early 2000s. Using primarily a collective perspective via the pronoun "we," Ernaux tracks cultural trends and global events that affected her generation.

Not only is the structure of this memoir quite unique but the subject matter is as well. Reading The Years, I felt able to empathize with Ernaux and her peers in ways that I probably wouldn't have were this memoir focused on only one person's perspective. Ernaux's signature no-frills language allows us readers to see how the era of her birth shaped her entire generation. Born at the end of World War Two, coming of age in the progressive 1960s, having children born in completely different circumstances, beginning to use the Internet... Somehow Ernaux brings historical facts to life in a rather engaging way despite the distance that an impersonal "we" point of view provides.