Born in 1940, Ernaux was brought up in Yvetot in Normandy. She is the only daughter of working-class parents who ran a cafe-cum-grocers, and her childhood was underpinned by class tensions within the family home and outside it. Ernaux attended a private Catholic girls’ school for her secondary education, which fuelled social divisions between her and her parents – in particular her father, which she explores in her fourth publication A Man’s Place. ALLURE: We’re living longer lives than ever before, so watching John and Annie gives me hope that my sex life will be long, too. Also, I love that they both got turned on to this particular form of lovemaking later in life. In France, in some ways still a deeply Catholic, conservative country, abortion wasn’t legalised until 1975; a young woman who found herself in trouble and didn’t want to give birth had very few options. Anyone who helped her – a doctor, a friend, an abortionist (what they used to call a faiseuse-d’anges, or angel-maker) – could go to jail, and the doctor would lose his licence. And jail wasn’t even the worst thing that could happen to a young woman who obtained an illegal abortion. In a scene with the doctor who first informs Anne that she’s pregnant, she implores him to do something. The word abortion isn’t uttered once. The idea was to focus on her body, not the setting – so that we’re not watching Anne but become her Audrey Diwan Diwan chose not to integrate these present-day reflections, in a voiceover for instance. “If I had included the author looking in the rearview mirror I would have confined this film to the past,” she said. And in her adaptation, Diwan tells me, it was important that Happening not feel like an artefact.

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In Happening, Ernaux writes, “I don’t believe there is a single museum in the world whose collections feature a work called The Abortionist’s Studio”. Why, I asked her, is it so important for artists or writers to depict it, to tell the stories of their own bodies? If you do nothing, you will be auto-enrolled in our premium digital monthly subscription plan and retain complete access for 65 € per month.The chairman of the Nobel Literature committee, Anders Olssen, described Ernaux’s work as “uncompromising and written in plain language, scraped clean”. One evening ‒ it was our last day ‒ in Tours, we had dinner in a brightly-lit restaurant where the walls were lined with mirrors, frequented by a sophisticated clientele. My father and I were seated at the end of a long table set up for the group. The waiters were paying little attention to us; we had to wait a long time between courses. At a small table nearby sat a girl aged fourteen or fifteen, suntanned, in a low-cut dress, and an elderly man who appeared to be her father. Growing up in a socially divided environment meant Ernaux felt ashamed of the supposedly distasteful aspects of her upbringing, such as the working-class environment of her father’s cafe or her mother’s shirking of the norms of middle-class housewifery and femininity, which she writes about in A Frozen Woman. This approach to writing is underpinned by a mission. Ernaux believes that writing about the self inevitably involves writing about a socio-political context, and thereby extends the representativeness of her own experience. By writing simply about her own experiences, she also wants to write into literature the collective experience of the French working-class. For cost savings, you can change your plan at any time online in the “Settings & Account” section. If you’d like to retain your premium access and save 20%, you can opt to pay annually at the end of the trial.

Annie Ernaux ‘It plunged me back to waiting for a period’: Annie Ernaux

There are more oblique references to the time as well. At the lunch table, the girls debate Camus versus Sartre, “a question of the gaze”. In their literature lecture, the professor reads a poem by Louis Aragon called “Elsa au miroir” (Elsa at Her Mirror), about his wife, Elsa Triolet, “combing her golden hair, as if she enjoyed tormenting her memory”. Anne is called on to give her reading of the poem. “He uses a lover’s drama to evoke a national one. It’s a political poem. For me they’re war references. In 1942, when the poem was published, Elsa Triolet and Aragon were communists. So I think they both hope for a patriotic awakening.” With this reading, Anne reframes what seems like a private concern as a public one.That desire to give voice to marginalised experiences is further illustrated in two of her “external diaries”, Exteriors and Things Seen, which record the everyday exchanges of people in outside spaces such as the supermarket or when commuting on the Paris metro. ALLURE: This is your main motivation for doing the work you do, right? So many kids are learning about sex from watching this stuff. I did this film with anger, with desire, with my belly, my guts, my heart and my head,” Diwan said, accepting her award in Venice. “I have finished putting into words what I consider to be an extreme human experience, bearing on life and death, time, law, ethics and taboo – an experience that sweeps through the body,” wrote Ernaux at the end of her book.

Annie Ernaux and writing from Nobel prize in literature: Annie Ernaux and writing from

But she has also been asked many times in promoting the film if it espouses a “female gaze”, a term that has been popularised in French cinema over the past few years, in part thanks to the work of the French writer and scholar Iris Brey. Her book Le regard féminin ( The Female Gaze, 2020) built on a tradition of feminist film theory to offer a mode by which a film could be understood, or not, to enact a female point of view, “a gaze,” as Brey wrote, “that allows us to share the lived experience of a female body onscreen”. This neutral way of writing comes to me naturally, it is the very same style I used when I wrote home telling my parents the latest news.But films have a visual power that books usually do not. There is one scene in particular that Ernaux and Diwan both refer to that I can’t describe here because it would ruin the taut suspense of the story and undermine Diwan’s carefully paced work. In describing what was at stake for Diwan filming that scene, Ernaux told me, “it was important to dare to confront the viewer with an unbearable image… I did it in my book, but I knew it would be a more difficult proposition to do it in the film. Audrey didn’t hesitate, and she pulled it off.”

AnnieNSFW - Reddit AnnieNSFW - Reddit

The way she excavates her own life without shame or supplication and offers it to us feels supremely generous. The reader might be silent on his or her own mortifications or moments of pain, but a small part of them can reside in Ernaux’s words, if we let them, and in the process free us – if only momentarily. E.L.: I definitely made this film with the intention to arouse, because that's what I do. It's just another kind of arousal than what we are used to. Most of the XConfessions stories are fictional, but lately, I've been making films in which we get to know real couples and we get to see the kind of sex they have in their ordinary lives. The idea is that these documentaries will show you different ideas around sex, because I think that people — we have so many questions.You may also opt to downgrade to Standard Digital, a robust journalistic offering that fulfils many user’s needs. Compare Standard and Premium Digital here. But I don’t think any woman would have made the same film. The gaze is complex, and gender is only one part of it,” she says. Audrey Diwan after winning the Golden Lion award for Happening at the Venice film festival last year. Photograph: Sipa US/Alamy