In one sense, The Years is a memoir spanning Annie Ernaux's childhood in post-war Northern France and up to the present day, but it isn't really, not at all. The Years is a collective memoir - of France, of the world, of the late 20th century. Ernaux, in the kind of relentless unsentimental prose of Sontag or de Beauvoir, writes without ever using an 'I', without ever mentioning a feeling, and demonstrates like nobody else I've ever read the ways that politics and history work on a life. JFK being assassinated? Not important when you're 22 and 8 weeks pregnant. Sexual liberation? Not such a liberation when you're married at 25, with a baby and a teaching position and a long grocery list, for all your education and philosophical acumen. The Years is personal writing like I've never encountered before, a memoir of a generation.
— MadeleineConsidered by many to be the iconic French memoirist's defining work, The Years is a narrative of the period 1941 to 2006 told through the lens of memory, impressions past and present, cultural habits, language, photos, books, songs, radio, television, advertising and news headlines. Annie Ernaux invents a form that is subjective and impersonal, private and collective, and a new genre - the collective autobiography - in order to capture the passing of time. At the confluence of autofiction and sociology, The Years is 'a Remembrance of Things Past for our age of media domination and consumerism' (New York Times), a monumental account of twentieth-century French history as refracted through the life of one woman.