These three books make up a kind of early biography of a young French woman struggling to enter a different social world. Through the lives of her father and mother in Positions and A Woman’s Story respectively, she conveys a meticulous portrait of the importance of speech, manners, and education in French society.


Ernaux depicts how these social nuances generate difficulties even in the closest of families. She focuses on how her parents coped with their lower class upbringing. Her father, raised to be a factory lad, is forever stuck with his ‘shy, gauche manner’. More familiar with the local dialect than standard French, ‘he always spoke carefully, terrified of using the wrong word, which would have been as bad as breaking wind’. Her mother, on the other hand, the driving force of their relationship, managed to elevate their social status by setting up a grocery store business. She was ‘anxious to pass as an educated woman’ and encouraged Annie’s intellectual pursuits as the prime avenue to self-improvement.


Ernaux marries and learns to differentiate ‘honest, hardworking people like my parents’ from her new husband’s middle class milieu, ‘where people got degrees and cultivated the art of irony’. Whereas his family was ‘not exactly rich but they had been to university, they were good conversationalists and they played bridge’, her folks ‘only really longed for things for the sake of it (possession), because in actual fact they didn’t know what was beautiful or what people were expected to admire.’ For her mother she explains, daily enjoyments, such as reading Le Monde or listening to Bach, were perceived as forms of demonstrating ‘economic supremacy’.


The third (short) book, Passion Perfect, diverges from the other two in being Ernaux’s own confession of her clandestine love for a married man. Anybody who has ever been torn between love and reason will appreciate this book. So ‘violent and unaccountable’ was this experience that simply waiting between their romantic encounters became an all-consuming endeavour. The pain of this affair forces Ernaux to understand the ‘sublime or deadly desires, lack of dignity, attitudes and beliefs I had found absurd in others’. But with this confrontation Ernaux overcomes the stigmas of social class and education and ultimately comes, as she puts it, ‘closer to the world’.

‘When I was a child, luxury was fur coats, evening dresses and villas by the sea. Later on, I thought it meant leading the life of an intellectual. Now I feel that it is also being able to live out a passion for a man or a woman.’ (Passion Perfect)