Ernaux and the Word She Won't Use

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She has spent fifty years writing about herself. She insists none of it is fiction.

The Distinction That Matters

Annie Ernaux has made her objections to the label autofiction explicit across interviews and prefaces spanning several decades, always on the same grounds: the term implies invention, and she claims none. Her project, as she has described it in paratexts to her books, is documentary — a disciplined recovery of lived experience through the instruments of literary form. The word she uses instead is écriture plate, a flat or level writing, stripped of the consolations of style that would transform suffering into art and, in doing so, falsify it.

L'Événement (2000), her account of an illegal abortion she underwent in 1963, demonstrates the distinction at its sharpest. Ernaux returned to the original diary she kept at the time, treating it as a primary source rather than raw material to be shaped. The resulting text holds the historical record and the act of recovering it in the same frame — the reader sees both the event and the archivist reconstructing it, each distinct. That double structure is not autofiction's characteristic blend of autobiography and novelistic licence; it is closer to historiography, with the self as the only available archive.

Les Années (2008), often seen as the centrepiece of the body of work for which Ernaux was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2022 ↗, makes the methodological claim most ambitiously. The book is narrated entirely in the third person — "she", not "I" — and proceeds through collective memory, the shared textures of French postwar life, as much as through the personal. Ernaux has described it in published interviews as an autobiographie impersonnelle, an impersonal autobiography: the individual dissolved into generation and epoch without the self being fictionalised. To call that autofiction is, by her account, to misread the direction of travel entirely.

The distinction matters for how the work is read. Autofiction, as theorised by Serge Doubrovsky — who coined the term in 1977 for his novel Fils — permits the author to reshape experience in the service of literary form. Ernaux's explicit claim is the opposite: form must submit to experience, never overwrite it. Whether that claim is itself a literary position — whether the fastidious insistence on transparency is its own form of construction — is a question her readers and critics have debated since La Place appeared in 1983. Ernaux's answer has remained consistent: whatever word you reach for, it should not be that one.