What Annie Ernaux Taught Me About the Memoirs We Don't Write

Annie Ernaux, Nobel Prize Laureate, 2022

Annie Ernaux's Nobel Prize–winning The Years erases the first-person "I" to build a collective portrait of postwar France. My own memoir, Petra in the Middle East, does the opposite — it insists on "I," because the book's whole subject is a self that keeps getting erased by other people. Reading Ernaux clarified, from the outside, a choice that I'd made by instinct.

How Annie Ernaux Writes Without "I"

A few weeks ago I sat down with The Years.

Ernaux does something almost nobody else attempts. She writes her own life without ever really saying "I." She calls herself "she." She calls her generation "we." Reviewing the book for The New York Times, Edmund White named the technique precisely: a "collective autobiography" — one woman's memory used as a lens for an entire generation's. In an interview with The White Review, Ernaux herself has described the impersonal register as her way of working out the relationship between the self, the collective, and the world that continually shapes both.

It's a stunning technique. It's also the exact opposite of what I did in Petra in the Middle East.

Petra In The Middle East: A Memoir

Why My Memoir Insists on the First Person

Ernaux grew up inside her own culture, writing about her own people, in her own language. Her formal challenge was to get outside her ego — to stop the memoir from being just about her, and let it become about everyone who lived those same French decades alongside her.

My formal challenge was the inverse. I wrote from inside rooms where I was constantly being read as something — as spectacle, as "other," as a body before I was ever a person. Stares on a street in Turkey. A stranger asking to photograph me like I was a landmark. The particular vertigo of being simultaneously hyper-visible and never actually seen. In that landscape, disappearing the "I" was never going to be the honest move. The "I" was the whole argument. Writing myself onto the page, in first person, scene by scene, was itself a form of resistance to being flattened into a category by everyone around me.

Two writers, two very different relationships to selfhood and, I'd argue, two structurally correct responses to two very different lives.

What the Two Memoirs Share: A Refusal of the Tidy Arc

For all our differences, Ernaux and I are doing something similar underneath the surface. Neither of us wrote a memoir with a single rising action and a bow on top. The Years is built from accumulated fragments — a photograph, an image, a slogan, repeated until decades take shape. Petra in the Middle East is built from vignettes — encounters, conversations, small ruptures — that accumulate into a portrait rather than resolve into a moral. Both books trust the reader to sit with pattern instead of plot. Both braid a private life into something larger than itself: hers, postwar French society; mine, the sectarian and diasporic realities of a region the West has mostly agreed to misread.

Two Different Literary Lineages

Ernaux's technique put her in conversation with Perec and Barthes: memoir remade as sociological document, the self as evidence of a collective. My book sits closer to a different tradition: the Black diasporic witness memoir, the lineage that runs through Baldwin where testimony itself, spoken in the first person, is the political act. Where Ernaux needed to subtract herself to tell the truth, I needed to stay fully present in mine.

I didn't set out to write a book in conversation with a Nobel laureate. But reading The Years clarified something about my own choices I hadn't fully named until I saw them from the outside: the decision to hold the "I" was never a lack of craft. It was the craft.

Frequently Asked Questions

How does Petra in the Middle East compare to Annie Ernaux's The Years? Both reject a conventional narrative arc for accumulated fragments, but they take opposite approaches to point of view — Ernaux dissolves the "I" into "she" and "we" to build a portrait of a generation; Petra in the Middle East holds a close first-person "I" as an act of resistance against erasure.

What is a "collective autobiography"? A term applied to Ernaux's The Years, describing a memoir that narrates a private life through impersonal pronouns so that one person's memory becomes a lens for an entire generation's history.

What is Petra in the Middle East about? A memoir about being seen, misread, and eventually recognized one Middle Eastern country at a time as a Black Caribbean woman moving through societies that keep trying to read her as spectacle rather than person.

If you've read The Years, I'd love to hear what you took from it. And if you haven't yet read Petra in the Middle East: A Memoir, I hope this is the nudge.

Petra Noel-Arthur is a Caribbean writer and the author of Petra in the Middle East: A Memoir.