Exteriors

Praise for Exteriors:
"Exteriors is honest, genuine and skillfully executed." --Columbus Dispatch
"Ernaux's writings walk a tightrope between art and confession, immersing us in a territory bounded on one side by commitment and on the other by desire." --Newsday
"Journal du dehors (Exteriors) is the opposite of an intimate diary. It shows a woman observing, without scorn or pity, the world out of which she came. . . . It is the text of a writer for whom the text is, simultaneously, interiority and provocation." --Télérama
Praise for Annie Ernaux:
"The author of one of the most important oeuvres in French literature, Annie Ernaux's work is as powerful as it is devastating, as subtle as it is seething." --Édouard Louis, author of The End of Eddy
"Ernaux is an unusual memoirist: she distrusts her memory... Ernaux does not so much reveal the past - she does not pretend to have any authoritative access to it - as unpack it." --Madeleine Schwartz, New Yorker
"Meticulous catalogs of longing, humiliation, class anxiety and emotional distress, Ernaux's books are unsparing in detail, pitiless in tone. In contrast to those of so many of her confession-minded peers, her shock tactics feel principled, driven less by narcissism or the need for self-justification than by some loftier impulse: a desire to capture the past as it was, undistorted by faulty memories, moral judgments or decorative literary flourishes." --Emily Eakin, New York Times Book Review

“Exteriors is honest, genuine and skillfully executed.” –Columbus Dispatch “Ernaux's writings walk a tightrope between art and confession, immersing us in a territory bounded on one side by commitment and on the other by desire.” –Newsday “Journal du dehors (Exteriors) is the opposite of an intimate diary. It shows a woman observing, without scorn or pity, the world out of which she came . . . . It is the text of a writer for whom the tex is, simultaneously, interiority and provocation.” –Telerama