"Ernaux's works aren't coy or glancing; they've been sharpened to a point. Though she seems like a writer of details, each book is a vital mission, carried out with thrusting force. . . . [A]t the start of the strikes against Macron this year, when workers and students once more exploded against the police, the eighty-two-year-old Ernaux appeared at the head of a march: the somewhat dissonant image of the writer, fresh from her Nobel win, who remembers where she came from and still knows whose side she is on. As she told the audience in Stockholm: given her experience as a woman and as a child of the working class, she writes to get revenge." –
Tobi Haslett,
Harper's Magazine "The harrowing beauty and brevity of these books and their apparent simplicity disguise somewhat the punishing cost of their honesty." –
Rachel Cusk,
New York Times Magazine
