Judy: On Wednesday in Stockholm,
Sweden, French writer Annie
ernaux delivered her Nobel
lecture, and spoke of how she
hopes her work, which mixes
fiction and memoir, has affected
others.
Tomorrow, she and this year's
other Nobel laureates will
formally receive their awards.
Jeffrey brown spoke with her for
our arts and culture series,
"Canvas."
>> [Speaking French]
Jonathan: -- Jeffrey: In a new
documentary titled "The super 8
years," we see a young French
woman named Annie ernaux a wife
and mother, a high school
teacher in the early 1970's.
What we don't see, taking place
at this time secretly
off-camera, the book she's
working on, her first.
The film, based on home movies
and produced many years later by
ernaux and her son, captures the
early inner struggles of a
woman, as she says, "Tormented
by the need to write" of her
life, to become what she would
later call "An ethnologist of
myself."
>> [Speaking French]
>> I truly hoped to transmit an
individual, personal experience,
but in such a way that it would
be received by others.
It was really that desire that
motivated me to write.
To be an ethnologist of myself
means to speak from my being,
from my experience, but looking
at it from a great distance,
approaching it from the exterior
of myself.
Jeffrey: Many books later,
ernaux would win literature's
biggest prize.
>> The Nobel prize in literature
for 2022 is awarded to the
French author Annie ernaux.
Jeffrey: Soon after the
announcement, ernaux, now 82 and
living outside Paris, came to
New York.
We spoke at the office of her
longtime U.S.
Publisher, seven stories press,
and I asked about mining the
past, and a line that begins
"The years," one of her
best-known books -- "All the
images," she writes, "Will
disappear."
>> I do think that in each of
us, images disappear when we
die.
And perhaps that's what made me
write, to think of this moment
when all the images I have seen
would disappear.
This feeling of the loss of
things.
But I also think that the true
reality of the world is
forgetting.
We forget a great deal, from a
collective perspective.
For instance, we're always
surprised when war arises again,
as we are seeing now.
So it's more a question of
forgetting than of memory.
And to write is to fight
forgetting.
Jeffrey: In some 23 volumes, 16
of them translated and published
in English, she's written one
woman's story, a woman who is
both her and not her.
She's been described as
genre-defying, her books not
quite novels, but not
traditional memoirs.
>> I don't try to define myself
in terms of a genre.
For me, the most important thing
is to find the form of the
writing that fits with what I'm
writing.
So, to me, the right term is
writer.
Jeffrey: One constant theme --
her working class roots in
normandy, where her parents ran
a grocery, far outside France's
traditional literary culture.
Her move through education and
writing into a more intellectual
world, and the distance that
created from her family and
within herself.
>> [Speaking French]
>> I remain divided between two
worlds.
Writing is the place where, with
these tools I've acquired, I see
the world.
But always from the world of my
youth, which I never could erase
.
What the writer Albert camus
called "The first man."
Well, there is the "First woman"
in me, which means that I will
always write from that separate
place.
Jeffrey: Has it been important
to you as a woman to tell a
story that perhaps is less told?
>> It's obvious these stories
haven't been told, especially
because they haven't been told
in the way I wanted them to be
told.
Jeffrey: Without sentimentality
but with finely crafted language
and probing honesty, always
working from memory, she's
written of deeply personal and
traumatic experiences.
In "Happening," first published
in 2000, and recently turned
into a feature film --
>> [Speaking French]
Jeffrey: She looks back to a
1963 pregnancy and abortion, an
almost barbaric procedure that
nearly killed her, at a time
when abortion was still illegal
in France.
The story, she knows, has a new
relevance.
>> [Speaking French]
>> It is a problem that wasn't
ultimately resolved.
I think my book "Happening"
reveals the savagery of abortion
for women when it is banned.
But those things are forgotten
.
Jeffrey: Are you surprised that
what you experienced so long ago
and then wrote about could
perhaps be with us again?
>> [Speaking French]
>> Above all, I'm horrified and
outraged that this could happen
again.
At the same time, I think that
there is something about the
power of women to bring children
into the world that men wanted
to appropriate and once again
want to appropriate.
Jeffrey: Sometimes in the books,
you seem to be trying to
understand what you're writing.
At the end of "A woman's story,"
you write, "This isn't a
biography.
Neither is it a novel.
Maybe a cross between
literature, sociology and
history."
>>[Speaking French]
Jeffrey: The sentences that you
quoted from "A woman's story,"
the book about my mother, were
indeed about trying to situate
myself in relationship to what
I'd just written.
It's work to write, and I want
the reader to understand that
I'm asking myself questions.
For me, to write is to go
looking for what I don't even
know myself before I write it.
Jeffrey: In her Nobel lecture,
Annie ernaux spoke of her hope
that her work can shatter the
loneliness of experiences
endured and repressed, and
enable beings to reimagine
themselves.
For the pbs newshour, I'm
Jeffrey brown in New York.