Our own passions absorb, fascinate, and sometimes consume us. In contrast, the passions of others can seem bewildering and often tedious. That paradox seems to me to sit at the heart of Annie Ernaux’s account of the love affair that overwhelmed her life in 1989. That year Ernaux, then in her late forties, started an intense relationship with a married man, a Soviet diplomat attached to the embassy in Paris. Her diary, published as Getting Lost, tells that story. With the benefit of distance and separation, the reader gets to see two things that Ernaux, in the cauldron of that affair, was unable to see. First, the object of her infatuation, identified here only as S, is using her for sex, to feed his ego, and nothing more. Second, none of the intensity, passion, and obsession felt by Ernaux was reciprocated by S. That lends a poignancy and pathos to this diary when read more than thirty years after the experiences it recounts. It may sound harsh, but none of this is intrinsically interesting. She committed herself to someone unworthy of her love, that commitment wasn’t reciprocated, and she suffered greatly. Keeping a journal as a record of that experience is easily understood, but publishing it seems to me to require some explanation. Does Ernaux’s undeniable brilliance as a writer necessarily elevate this record of painful, deeply felt experience into literature? No, I don’t think so. Although honest, frank, and courageous, Ernaux’s diary of a year of deception and self-deception, agony and bitterness ultimately left me feeling that it should have been kept in a locked drawer, for her eyes only.

When it was announced that Annie Ernaux had won the 2022 Nobel Prize in Literature, I was very intrigued to read her work. Getting Lost may not have been the best place to start, but I am eager now to read her fiction.