SOURCE: Ernaux, Annie, and Maria Simson. “Annie Ernaux: Diaries of Provincial Life.” Publishers Weekly 243, no. 50 (9 December 1996): 49-50.

In the following interview, Ernaux discusses her personal history, her writing career, and the inspirations behind Exteriors.

All writers draw on their lives in their work, but few subject their past to the kind of unflinching examination that Annie Ernaux does. Whether she is describing her adolescent transgressions or her mature, infatuated affair with a married man, she never heroizes or editorializes, never tells readers what they should be feeling.

“Displaying one's feelings in a book,” she says, “is immodest. It's like crying on the shoulder of the reader.” Ernaux leaves much up to the reader, even what exactly her books are: “It doesn't matter to me if something I've written is called a novel or autobiography,” she says. “It's readers who decide if what they're reading is one or the...