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In 1999, living in France for the first time, I picked up a copy of Passion simple by Annie Ernaux at the Fnac My French wasn’t great, but the vocabulary was simple, as was the subject: one woman’s obsession with her Russian lover ‘From September last year,’ she writes, ‘I did nothing else but wait for a man: for him to call me and come round to my place’ Entire days slip by in this heightened state: the cycle of waiting, then finally hearing from him, or seeing him, then the emptiness again, followed by the immediate hunger to repeat the experience It taught me so much about the unfulfilment of fulfilment I loved how spare and almost unemotional the prose was, all while evoking this most emotion-ridden of experiences, and in time, reading her other work, I would come to understand that this écriture plate, or flat writing, was one of its strongest, most unique attributes From books like La place (A Man’s Place, 1983, for which she won France’s prestigious Prix Renaudot) or Une femme (A Woman’s Story, 1988), about the deaths, respectively, of Ernaux’s father and mother, to Les Années (2008), recently published in English, translated by Alison L Strayer, as The Years, Ernaux demonstrates a striking ability to take the most wrenching of experiences and render them unflinchingly, without moral judgment   Ernaux was born in 1940 in Normandy to a working-class family; her parents worked in a factory and later ran a small café and shop This background informs all of Ernaux’s work, from her early anti-novels Les Armoires vides (Cleaned Out, 1974) and Ce qu’ils disent ou rien (1977) to her later masterpieces L’événement (Happening, 2000), about an illegal abortion, or Mémoire de fille (2016), which takes place during the summer of 1958, when she worked as a counsellor at a summer camp in Normandy, and explores the shame she felt following her first sexual experience with another counsellor there [1] Elizabeth Bowen once described herself as a writer ‘for whom places loomed large’; this is also true of Ernaux, for whom the past is a