an__otherbook

‘Naturally I shall not opt for narrative, which would mean inventing reality instead of searching for it. Neither shall I content myself with merely picking out and transcribing the images I remember; I shall process them like documents, examining them from different angles to give them meaning. In other words, I shall carry out an ethnological study of myself.’

Ernaux is a master of self-excavation. She opens Shame with a violent memory and spends the book trying to understand how it shaped her life moving forward. What she refuses to do is draw a solid conclusion, she resists settling on an absolute truth. Instead, the process of exploring and examining her teenage years that follow the incident is the whole point of the book. By refusing to reach for a grand narrative, the reader is left with a book of self-inquiry—which is all the more powerful in its resistance to find an answer.