Over the past few weeks, I’ve started to read more works by French writers, including Leïla Slimani’s Adèle and Elisa Shua Dusapin’s Winter in Sokcho. To expand my reading, I asked individuals for other recommendations of female French writers, and one person suggested that I read Annie Ernaux. At the person’s suggestion, I went to the stacks in my library and pulled down a copy of Ernaux’s 2008 memoir The Years, a book that reads, in many ways, more like a novel than a memoir. In fact, as I read it, I kept thinking about it as a novel, not as a memoir about Ernaux’s life and the personal and cultural moments that impacted it. Reading The Years, I also thought about it in relation to works such as Magda Szabó’s The Fawn, Helen Weinzweig’s Basic Black with Pearls, and Olga Tokarczuk’s Flights, specifically in relation to Ernaux’s style over the course of the memoir.

Two recurring themes throughout Ernaux’s memoir concern memory and our role in the historical arc of time. Ernaux contemplates the memories we hold within us, the stories we tell ourselves and others, and the ways that stories, one day, will disappear, just as we, one day, will cease to physically exist as history continues on without us. Ernaux centers these themes with the two epigraphs she provides from José Ortega y Gasset and Anton Chekov. Ernaux quotes Gasset who writes, “All we have is our history, and it does not belong to us.” Ernaux’s exploration of her existence, and by extension our existence, lies at the core of this quote. While we exist within ourselves, we also exist within our connection to others, and expanding outwards to history. Our memories, our stories, our experiences all reside within the communal history and movement we encapsulate, and Ernaux highlights this very fact throughout The Years through her movement, in each section, from a third person description of photos of herself at various stages of life to a communal first person plural discussion of society during the same periods.

The shift from third person, a detached narration, to first person singular to first person plural, or from “her” to “I” to “we,” highlights the ways that we, no matter how we try to remain apart from others, connect to one another through time and space. We all become part of history, interconnected through our interactions with one another and through our shared experiences in the world. Thinking about the construction of The Years at the end of the memoir, Ernaux takes a disconnected view, viewing herself as author from above as she contemplates the photos which are “incessantly not-she” because they reside outside of herself even though they depict herself. Ernaux contemplates this and then writes, “There is no ‘I’ in what she views as a sort of impersonal autobiography. There is only ‘one’ and ‘we,’ as if now it were her turn to tell the story of the time-before.”

Taken with Gasset’s epigraph, Ernaux’s movement from third person to fist person draws our attention to the collective, or as Allison Strayer notes, the “je collective” that embodies our interconnectedness to one another. By disconnecting herself from the “she” in the photographs, Ernaux also points out the ways that we think about ourselves and our own identities. We usually consider a photograph to be an “actual” representation of reality or a small “facsimile” depicting a scene from our own lives. However, Ernaux calls upon to question this assumption. Does a photograph accurately depict a scene? Or, does it show a simulacrum of a specific scene? Does it show one’s true self? Or, does it show a masked self? When we look back at the photograph, do we see ourselves or someone else, someone we used to be or someone we never were? These are all questions that arise through Ernaux’s use of a detached third person representation in the photos of herself.

Looking from this angle, “[t]here is no ‘I’” that embodies the text. The “I” gets removed and in its place the “we” takes its place, bringing the “she” and the “I” into being together, linking them. While these represent the “I,” they also represent the “we.” In this manner, Ernaux collapses the space between us, merging us together in space and time. She does this throughout The Years, priming us as readers to become an active participant in her life and experiences, notably when it comes to our shared cultural experiences. Even though we participate in a shared history and life, we will disappear and fade away.

While Gasset’s epigraph places us both within and oustide of history, the epigraph from Chekhov lays bare our very mortality and the fact that once we let loose this mortal coil “[t]hey’ll forget us.” Chekhov continues, “Such is our fate, there is no help for it. What seems to us so serious, significant, very important, will one day be forgetten or will seem unimportant.” We view our existence as extraordinary, and everything within our existence becomes “serious, significant, very important.” However, in the grand scheme of things, our existence becomes merely a grain of sand falling to the bottom of the hour glass, and once our grain descends to the bottom, our present life “will in time seem strange, inconvenient, stupid, not clean enough, perhaps even sinful.”

Ernaux opens The Years with a simple sentence — “All the images will disappear” — before proceeding to four pages where she describes various images across time, The section concludes with Ernaux writing, “They will vanish all at the same time, like the millions of images that lay behind the foreheads of the grandparents, dead for half a century, and of the parents also dead.” We once inhabited images with those long deceased, the parents and grandparents, and like them, “one day we’ll appear in our children’s memories, among their grandchildren and people not yet born.” We will not be here, appearing in new photographs, we will only exist in memories and the memoires of those who maintain our stories. Memroy serves as a conduit because “[i]t pairs the dead with the living, real with the imaginary beings, dreams with history.”

Once we shed this plain of existence, “[n]othing will come out of the open mouth, neither I nor me.” Our language, the “dictionary of words amassed between cradle and grave,” will cease to exist. We will merely become a name spoken during holiday dinners, a reminiscence confined to an anecdote devoid of flesh, devoid, of muscle, devoid of bone. We will flatten “until we vanish into the vast anonymity of a distant generation” when those who say our name around the table cease to invoke us, causing us to finally pay Charon for our final passage across the river Styx and fade away from the realm of those who continue to use language and form sounds with their mouths.

Even though we may complete our journey, a part of us remains. We remain as a residual component of history, a component attached to the events that shaped our very beings in this realm. Someone, somewhere, when those we know stop calling our name, may trace our names on a document. They may see us in a faded photograph, reading a part of us on the inscription on the back of our image. They may read words we wrote, become intrigued, and start to reform us, never truly reconstituting our beng. They will call us back across Styx for a time, only for us to have to pay the toll again once the new person ceases to say our name.

Lillian Smith writes, “Death can kill a man, that is all it can do to him. It cannot end his life because of memory.” Physical death does not mean we no longer exist, and as a result of this knowledge, during our time here, as we create the memories that craft our history, we must continually ask ourselves, “What will people say about me to keep me alive?”

What are your thoughts? As usual, let me know in the comments below. Make sure to follow me on Twitter @silaslapham.