For decades, French writer Annie Ernaux has dissected the most humiliating, private and scandalous moments from her past with almost clinical precision: ¡°I shall carry out an ethnological study of myself,¡± she wrote in her 1997 memoir ¡°Shame.¡±
On Thursday, she was awarded one of literature¡¯s highest honors, the Nobel Prize, for her body of work. Ernaux¡¯s writing has spoken particularly to women and to others who, like her, come from a working class seldom depicted with such clarity in literature: She has described her upbringing in a small town in Normandy, an illegal abortion she had the 1960s, her dissatisfaction with domestic life and a passionate extramarital affair.
It was a striking choice by the Nobel committee to honor a writer whose work is woven from intensely personal and often ordinary experiences. Mats Malm, the permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, which decides the prize, announced the decision at a news conference in Stockholm, lauding the ¡°courage and clinical acuity with which she uncovers the roots, estrangements and collective restraints of personal memory.¡±
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