Annie Ernaux’s affair with A

Annie Ernaux’s affair with A becomes the measure by which the narrator experiences time, ordinary activity, and the distance between herself and other people. Its decisive significance lies not in a promised future together but in the way desire reorganizes her life—and, after A leaves France, becomes the subject and condition of her writing.

Identity and Circumstances

The affair is between the first-person narrator and A, a foreign man whose work and country become central to her attention. From September of the previous year, she says, her life has been dominated by waiting for his calls and visits. She continues to go to the supermarket and cinema, take clothes to the dry cleaner, read, and mark essays, but these familiar tasks no longer feel fully inhabited. They proceed almost instinctively; she remembers little of the films, conversations, and people around her. The deliberate choices she can still identify—reading about A’s country and selecting clothes and make-up—are directed toward him.

The affair is conducted in the intervals of ordinary life, but those intervals lose their former importance. In conversation, the narrator attends most closely to subjects that touch on A: his work, his country, and places he has visited. A description of a Havana nightclub catches her because A had once been sent to Havana and might have been there. In a book, she seizes on a line about lovers kissing with their eyes closed and treats A’s way of kissing as evidence that he loves her. Reading, like other activities, becomes a means of filling the time between meetings and searching for support for what she hopes to believe.

Waiting and the Organization of Daily Life

The telephone governs the narrator’s days. She tries not to leave home except for work, since A knows her working hours and might call while she is away. She avoids the vacuum cleaner and hairdryer so their noise will not mask the ring. Each call brings a brief surge of hope, usually followed by dejection when someone else is on the line. When she recognizes A’s voice, the long wait and jealousy disappear with startling speed; the voice itself seems slight beside the immense importance it has acquired in her life.

A call arranging a visit starts a more immediate, disordered wait. The narrator prepares herself and the house, yet even simple tasks become difficult to organize. Once ready, she cannot concentrate on reading or marking essays. She sometimes writes the date and time on a sheet of paper, notes that A is going to come, and records her fears that he may not arrive or may no longer desire her. Later, she adds that he came, leaving the anticipation and its aftermath on the same page. The written record makes visible the interval that ordinary chronology cannot: for her, the meeting outweighs the other events of a life, including having children, passing exams, and travelling far away.

The visit itself sharpens rather than resolves her awareness of time. She removes her watch before A arrives, while he keeps his on. Looking at the kitchen clock, she counts the hours remaining and wonders where the present has gone. As he dresses to leave, each piece of clothing marks the approach of the end. Afterwards she sits among the glasses, plates, clothes, and rumpled sheets, reluctant to put the room back in order because its objects recall moments of the meeting. She delays washing until the next day, treating the aftermath as a temporary way of keeping the encounter close.

The affair also makes desire feel like a finite resource. The narrator counts their meetings and believes that each adds something to the relationship, while suspecting that the accumulation of pleasure may eventually bring them apart. Physical intensity and time seem to work against one another: what is gained in intensity is lost in duration. After A leaves, fatigue gives way to apathy and renewed expectation; as the days pass without a call, she becomes convinced that he has left her.

Jealousy, Imagination, and Unequal Attention

The narrator’s attention exceeds what she can know about A’s life. She imagines him spending a day without thinking of her, going through ordinary routines while she thinks of him from morning to night. The thought fills her with wonder, but she does not claim that her own absorption makes her more entitled to his attention. At moments, recognizing that he may be occupied chiefly with his career and his own life releases her from the belief that he is exceptional. Yet the detachment does not hold: shop windows displaying dresses and lingerie return her thoughts to a possible next meeting.

Jealousy takes shape through imagined scenes. A magazine article about Cuban dancers convinces her, without evidence, that A must have met the woman pictured. She imagines them together and finds the possibility more persuasive than its improbability. Even A’s call to meet cannot immediately relieve the anxiety; pleasure is shadowed by the anticipated pain of his departure. She wants to end the affair to escape dependence on the telephone, but understands that separation would leave her with days in which there was nothing to wait for. She would rather continue under the torment of jealousy than face that emptiness, while recognizing that the affair will end eventually, beyond her control.

Her strategies for managing uncertainty range from avoidance to elaborate acts of imagination. She declines a public event to which A has been invited because she cannot bear to see him socially, then becomes preoccupied with picturing him there. She tries to learn where he spends his free time, imagining him running in Fontainebleau forest or driving toward Deauville, and finds comfort in placing him at a particular location. In this imagined geography, knowing where he is seems to protect her from infidelity, although the knowledge cannot actually control his choices.

Waiting also becomes a physical and imaginative practice. In stations, the Metro, and waiting rooms, where she can sit without having to act, she deliberately drifts into thoughts of A and experiences a rush of pleasure. Repeated images and memories seem to make the mind itself bodily, capable of sexual intensity. This is not a resolution of the affair’s uncertainty; it is one way the narrator inhabits the time in which she has no access to A.

Departure, Grief, and the Work of Memory

Six months after A leaves France for his own country, the narrator expects that she may never see him again. Her grief affects both body and routine. She wakes in the night in pain and, during the day, tries to keep from being idle because she fears becoming lost. She makes herself dress and put on make-up, though these small actions require effort. Ordinary media and shop displays become difficult to face because she sees the figure of a woman waiting for a man in advertisements and cannot look at lingerie in shop windows.

Memory supplies what the present no longer can. The narrator tries to reconstruct A in detail, recalling his green eyes, the lock of hair on his forehead, the shape of his shoulders and thighs, and the texture of his skin. She recognizes that such reconstruction comes close to hallucination, making it difficult to draw a firm line between remembering and madness. At another point, she gives herself pleasure while feeling that it belongs to him. The affair persists not as a shared present but as an inward experience assembled from bodily recollection and repeated images.

Writing begins about two months after A’s departure, with the account of waiting that opens the recollection. The narrator can tie memories of the affair to particular public and domestic events: the riots in Algeria, the weather on 14 July 1989, and the purchase of a blender in June, the day before a meeting. But she cannot link individual pages of writing to the rain or to world events during the months of composition, including the fall of the Berlin Wall and the execution of the Ceaușescus. The contrast marks a difference between living through passion, when events become attached to its chronology, and writing about it, when time is experienced otherwise.

The past tense of the account does not simply close the affair. It allows the narrator to remain, in writing, within the age when actions were directed toward one person, but it also reproduces the pain of waiting in a new form. Rereading the pages recalls the bathrobe A used at her home; unlike the written account, the garment may one day become only part of a bundle of rags. The narrator wonders whether writing can save such a private object from oblivion, even as she acknowledges that a book cannot restore the lived encounter.

Writing, Exposure, and Significance

For the narrator, writing about the affair is not a straightforward explanation of what happened or a request for A to respond. A had said, “You won’t write a book about me.” She distinguishes the work from a book about him or a book about herself: it translates into words the effect his existence had on her life, an offering intended for others and probably never to be read by him. The account’s value lies in giving form to the experience without claiming to recover the relationship intact.

Publication changes the terms of that writing. While the pages remain private and handwritten, the narrator can regard them as nearly inconsequential. The prospect of readers brings the work closer to social judgment and the demand to justify intimate experience, including questions about whether it is an autobiography. She admits that continuing to write delays the trauma of handing the pages to others. Once the text appears in public characters, she expects to lose the innocence of writing without risk of being read.

The narrator nevertheless rejects the idea that exposure is the only purpose of writing about private life. She contrasts the writer with an exhibitionist, for whom being seen is the point, and explains that the distance between writing and eventual reading makes it possible to write without dwelling on consequences. The gap permits a kind of freedom, though it cannot guarantee that readers will never arrive. Her account’s frankness thus rests on a tension between privacy and address: the experience begins as something written for no audience, then becomes an offering to people whose judgments the narrator cannot control.

In retrospect, the affair has brought the narrator closer to experiences she had once considered absurd in other people: overwhelming desire, diminished dignity, and convictions altered by passion. She says it allowed her to approach the frontier separating her from others and sometimes believe she could cross it. She also redefines luxury: beyond material wealth or an intellectual life, it can mean being able to live out a passion for a man or a woman. The affair ends in absence, but its lasting consequence is a changed understanding of experience—and the words through which that change can be shared.