Mireille Juchau

What does it mean to narrate the humiliations of ageing, loneliness, and death in the first person when your background is working class? For such a writer, saying ‘I’ is political too, said Annie Ernaux in her Nobel Prize lecture, because it involves claiming an authority rarely granted in other parts of life. Ernaux uses her incendiary, affectless ‘I’ not just to recount one individual experience, but to transcend it. For ‘I’ to speak to the reader it must become, she says, ‘transpersonal’.