[3] Ernaux was born in Lillebonne in Normandy, France, and grew up in nearby Yvetot,[4] where her parents, Blanche (Dumenil) and Alphonse Duchesne,[5] ran a café and grocery in a working-class part of town.

[7] Upon returning to France, she studied at the universities of Rouen and then Bordeaux, qualified as a schoolteacher, and earned a higher degree in modern literature in 1971.

[8] In the early 1970s, Ernaux taught at a lycée in Bonneville, Haute-Savoie,[9] at the college of Évire in Annecy-le-Vieux, then in Pontoise, before joining the National Centre for Distance Education,[10] where she was employed for 23 years.

[25] In this book, Ernaux writes about herself in the third person ('elle', or 'she' in English) for the first time, providing a vivid look at French society just after the Second World War until the early 2000s.

[31] On 6 October 2022, it was announced that Ernaux would be awarded the 2022 Nobel Prize in Literature[32][33] "for the courage and clinical acuity with which she uncovers the roots, estrangements and collective restraints of personal memory".

In 2019, Ernaux signed a letter calling on a French state-owned broadcasting network not to air the Eurovision Song Contest, which was held in Israel that year.

[37] In 2021, after the Operation Guardian of the Walls, she signed another letter that called Israel an apartheid state, claiming that "To frame this as a war between two equal sides is false and misleading.

[38][39] Ernaux signed a letter that supported the release of Georges Abdallah, who was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1982 for the assassination of an American military attaché, Lt. Col. Charles R. Ray, and an Israeli diplomat, Yacov Barsimantov.

The protests that followed the death of Jina Mahsa Amini, a young woman in the custody of Guidance Patrol (Morality Police) initially started against compulsory hijab law in Iran but soon took a broader focus on liberty.