My first Ernaux, and I’ll definitely read more. I read this only after watching the extraordinary stage adaptation (on at the Harold Pinter Theatre until April, with a five-woman cast including Romola Garai, Deborah Findlay, and Gina McKee). Some of the play’s detail actually comes from Happening and A Girl’s Story, although the outlines of those traumatic events are in The Years, the book, too. The approach Ernaux takes to autobiography here is basically collective, so the pronoun is “we” for most of the book. Occasionally, “she” is used for descriptions of photographs and slightly more personal interludes, but that’s as intimate as it gets. As a result, its portrait of a Frenchwoman’s life between 1940 and 2006 is both individual—through those photos and the elements of family life that are highlighted—and something deeper and broader, national, semi-mythological. The book, even more than the stage play, helps you understand the phenomenon of living through events as a human being. Often, Ernaux describes not having thought about major historical moments on the day they happen, unless they’re happening in France, and sometimes not even then. (The only global event that truly breaks the skin of the personal is September 11th.) Yet, still, we feel the currents of politics, the impact of technological advances, the philosophical alterations in worldview from decade to decade. It’s so clever, so Woolfian; parts of it also reminded me of Lively’s Moon Tiger, with its insistence on the complete uniqueness of the world inside every person’s head and the way a whole history of the world dies when an individual does. Source: Bromley libraries