Annie Ernaux unpublished: “There is one thing I want more than anything: return to anonymity”

December 1963

We haven’t seen each other for two months, something that seems to import me alone. What is going to be of me, which I have loved freedom.

June 1988

There is one thing that I want more than anything: to return to loneliness, to anonymity, to insignificance in the world; Recover the irresponsibility of childhood, the afternoons in the garden, the birds, when I dreamed that I would go to remote countries, to know world, that things would happen to me. And all that has happened and will continue to happen to me, perhaps, and yet what I want most is to return to that time when nothing had happened yet. Not to recover my desire and my dream, but precisely what I did not like or detest; That is, my real life: the field, the distant noises of the cars, of a wooden saw, the voice of my father, the barking of the dogs, the bell of the door of the store. Everything that makes me relive that -Venecia, on a Sunday morning; write; Love, sometimes, in 1984- is happiness. It seems to me that here I approach something important, to that truth that I am looking for.

January 1991

I woke up at four in the morning. There were two hours for the American ultimatum. I have returned to sleep and I dreamed that Sadam Husein retired from Kuwait.

11 h. The airplanes continue to furrow the sky, fast. Everything makes me, without images. Cry. Absence of memories, except a few: the bombing in the forest. Only the fear of the first years of my life. 1944. I am four years old. That’s all. The V2, the ‘robots’, the alert sirens. The frightening stories: “The occasions were collapsed”, “in the wheelchair of the disabled nobody left,” and so on. Only the past is apprehended when reviving it, repeating it. This morning, something begins to be repeated for me, war. Like love, like death, they are unusual, unpredictable things.

August 1993

Regarding my children, I have the same impression as in another time in front of my mother. I do not know how to say, only that it is of the same order: their existence, like hers, is my life, life. The pain of separation. Not being able to speak, or on so few occasions, of that, of my relationship with my children, of that possibility, of that certainty, of being able to “go to the end of the world” for them. Thus reproducing the Mother Loba who was my mother for me.

November 29, 2008

Odile’s voice evokes names, things, often forgotten, that take me back to the classes of the Saint-Michel boarding school with a sharpness, with an impression of being there very strong. For example, in Latin class with Father Schoguarden, tiny, with the cassock full of spots, in the weak and yellowish light of the ‘Aula Saint-Louis’. Or walking along the wheel le mail with Odile. An impression of reality that I notice the thighs tight by my gray skirt of Tergal, the chimney neck of my navy blue wool sweater around the neck. I wore blue dancers in autumn, with sixteen years, and I imagined that the Russians had invaded France, because of Budapest, where Imre Nagy was replaced by Kádár. But what do I look like myself?

December 2001

What if believing that I have come to this world to write was a pure construction? A construction over the years?

Thursday, November 3, 2022

“They” have given me the Nobel Prize. That Thursday, in the kitchen, it seemed to me that another woman got rid of the real woman. That other woman assumed the role, spoke at a press conference crowded in Gallimard and continued to do it everywhere without any taste. Traveling with David to the United States, to Italy, for the movie, prevented me from getting to work in the speech that I have to pronounce. I only have a week, more or less, to write it. I have woken up at 3: 30h in the morning and I haven’t returned to sleep; I am not being able to do it due to lack of time.