I recently read, A Man’s Place by Annie Ernaux and I was floored by her writing style.

It reminded me of the type of writing I have been doing in my journals since the age of 15 where I have captured snippets of my life as an anxious teenager, a curious but sensible adult and a disheartened-with-the-world edging towards angry middle-ager.

The big difference is that she shared her entire life – and the life of her working class parents – in the most public way and in an unsentimental and factual manner.

Ernaux’s books tend to be short, often around a hundred pages, and ferociously sharp, written in a direct, declarative style that she has called “l’écriture plate”: “flat writing.” (“I shall never experience the pleasure of juggling with metaphors or indulging in stylistic play,” she once wrote.

The New Yorker

In so doing, she makes the time and place come alive to the point that reading their stories, I am dumbfounded at how similar and aligned my own upbringing and situations about “breaking out of your social class” are prevalent in her (and my) lives.

I’ve often thought that I’d like to write more but what stops me is this fear of becoming too vulnerable or worse, having my life and the people in it judged for what they thought, did or said. No wonder she published her books after her parents passed away. You simply can’t write like this because it’s just so…open. All power to her. She’s done a brave thing and no wonder she won the literature prize for it.

Annie Ernaux mentioned that she tried to fictionalise the situations and in the end, it somehow didn’t sit right with her so instead, she began to write in what was described a blend of memoir, journal and autobiography [“autofiction”]. She writes snippets of memory in a language that isn’t sentimental or overly flowing with adjectives, feeling and emotions. Instead, she simply writes as she recalls the memory and allows the reader to make their own picture.

To write like this requires courage because no doubt, you’ll end up hurting the people you write about. So she wrote this book after her father died – very soon after. In some way, it feels angry as she tries to make sense about the shame he – and indeed, that generation – felt all his life being ‘working class’ and how she was the only person in her family to go to university to “break” that social class.

Her use of italics sprinkled through her book to explain how people back then thought about social class “you are defined, and will always be defined by your class “, maintaining reputation “what will people think” and “knowing your place” was also an eye opener. I grew up with exactly the same messages. To this day, I’m still confused as to whether these messages helped or hindered me in my life but as I grow older, I’m reflecting a lot about the choices I made.

My bets are on the latter.

Nevertheless, I’m so glad to have discovered Annie Ernaux thanks to my local library. I have now borrowed another 5 of her books and will read these over the coming weeks. Maybe this is my inspiration to start writing and to find my own voice through writing.