After the events of that summer, it took Ernaux another decade and a half to find her voice. Her first novel, written at college, was rejected by publishers as “too ambitious,” she said. When she took up writing again, in the early 1970s, she was a French teacher and a married mother of two, newly acquainted with the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu and his theory of social reproduction. “I lived with men for periods of time, but very quickly, I would get tired of it. By that point, Ernaux had done away with any pretense of fiction, and the book, which sold 200,000 copies in two months, attracted virulent criticism from social conservatives.

Source: International New York Times April 07, 2020 07:52 UTC