Even at 227 pages The Years is such a daunting book. Ernaux’s openness to conveying experience, when turned upon history, makes for a narrativization of the passing of time that is almost unbearably tender. Similar to how she writes about her altered experience of reality following an orgasm, of becoming herself a palimpsest, her writing lends an acuity to the spirit that increases the capacity of the reader to feel and think.

This project of hers, to retrieve “the memory of collective memory in an individual memory” and in doing so “capture the lived dimension of History,” is an intelligible approach to analyzing culture and history that fits perfectly with Ernaux’s approach to self-history. She doesn’t pretend to sacrifice positionality, either. Ernaux writes here either in the first-person plural (“we”) or the third-person (“she,” about herself) and it’s clear that her history is the history of the liberal white French woman. She is more than aware of how race and her colonizer status set her apart from others, and too of how the collective suffering/experience of women generates solidarity as a superreal force.

Marking the ease with which colonialism and consumerism adapt and absorb across generations and political stances to subdue the consciousnesses of the people, to take over and complicate the interior world, Ernaux has truly captured both the social and the personal in The Years. A memoir of a time and place and woman. A sweet song for the things we would like to save, and the memories that exist only within us. The first Ernaux to make me break down crying. An impossibly good book.