A Life beyond Struggle

Over the years of her long journey of writing random journal entries, the interiors and exteriors of her own everyday life captures her contemporary living in a small town on the outskirts of Paris. She displayed her significant style of writing Autobiographical memoirs, showcasing pains, pathos, chaotic, unveiling the contradictions of social inequality, using her pen as “her knife” to maintain the rights of “women and oppressed.”

Annie Ernaux, the first French woman who is the Nobel Laureate in Literature in 2022, awarded for her bravery, “courage and clinical acuity” to pen down largely as autobiographical memoirs.

She admitted clearly that she felt the urge to raise her voice for the oppressed and the freedom of women, considering herself a feminist writer. Writing for the middle-class in a very transparent way, exploring her own life experiences, her failed relationships, her parent’s death, her painful abortion, failed affairs with thirty years younger lover, or a man from Russia, and despite all these typically intolerable incidents her head remained high, unbowed, indomitable through all her life.

In her autobiographical memoir, she wrote, when she confronted the girls from middle class, she experienced for the first time the “shame of her working-class parents” and the backdrop.

But the main theme of her official biography dealt with ” the body and sexuality, intimate relationships, social inequality of changing class through time and memory.

“Cleaned Out”. her fictional account which dealt with illegal abortion she faced in 1964, even which she kept secret from her family.

So many shades of pathos, chaotic class changing situations, the shame of her parent’s class, her agonizing melancholy are vibrantly noted one after another memoirs.

The death of her father, her mother’s dementia signifies a major and permanent change in her: “LA PLACE “, her autobiographical memoir dealt with a basic biographical fact—how do children whose career and education lift them out of the class and the mentality into which they were born come to terms with their social and family origins? How may they communicate with the group to which they originally used to belong?

These emotions deeply felt by Annie Ernaux and the only solution was to her was to write about her experience.

LA PLACE belongs to the    ‘one Société confusèment honteuse de ses origines’.

“Woman’s Story ” which dealt with her mother’s life and death, her painful sufferings caused due to dementia, her two years’ constant struggle with her ailing mother.

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