“And I will capture your minds with sweet novelty.”
- Ovid
I recently re-read Annie Ernaux’s autobiographical masterpiece The Years ahead of attending its first theatre adaptation in the UK. A personal account, but narrated in the choral ‘we’, it documents Ernaux’s life and times, from her working-class childhood in 1940s provincial Normandy to her metropolitan heyday in Paris as a teacher, mother, and celebrated writer. For Ernaux, the years don’t...