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The Yale Review | Annie Ernaux’s Previously Unpublished Diaries on…

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Without realizing it, I am widening the gap between my parents and myself, but I need them, and because of them I’d be capable of many things, as if I wanted to take on all the suffering, the humiliation they’ve been through, and avenge them. It is partly because of them that I’ve written, but it wasn’t the right book. I’ll start over, probably with short stories. Why have I always wanted to do bad things, but in other respects I’m always suffering? Sometimes, like today, I’m afraid—“scruples.” Monday, August 5, 1968 Useless revolt, and such dreadful boredom sometimes that I’d like to get on a train and flee to a place where there isn’t a yard cluttered with rubbish and where there would be sunshine. I’m reading a novel by S. de Beauvoir, She Came to Stay, and it’s a strain. I’ll never write that way. Monday, January 5, 1970 For me, writing would be a better way of being. It’s as if the person I am when out in the world had no balance or depth, as if things were alien to me or, even

The Yale Review | Annie Ernaux’s Previously Unpublished Diaries on… Memoir Writing Unpublished journal entries Annie Ernaux Annie Ernaux at age twenty-two in her hometown of Yvetot, France, 1963. Courtesy the author and Seven Stories Press translated by Alison L. Strayer and Emma Ramadan Thursday, April 4, 1963 Without realizing it, I am widening the gap between my parents and myself, but I need them, and because of them I’d be capable of many things, as if I wanted to take on all the suffering, the humiliation they’ve been through, and avenge them. It is partly because of them that I’ve writt

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