Annie Ernaux’s 'Look at the Lights, My Love'

In Look at the Lights, My Love, translated into English by Alison L. Strayer, Annie Ernaux ponders the supermarket. Seasons and capitalism collide in our shared cultural space. The au pair who stole sweets and alternated between bulimia and anorexia in Ernaux’s A Girl’s Story returns, but now she abides by the law and exits through the checkout. Yogurt is a necessity now, not a magic diet pill. The big box store is a little errand to ward off the fraying edges of existentialism. 

Since winning the Nobel Prize in October, Annie Ernaux has had such a big year that Seven Stories Press made merch with her name on it in a Death Metal font, and meme accounts like katebush.420 regularly mention her as a signifier for longing. The author of over twenty books, Ernaux writes incisive, diaristic novels and novelistic diaries about her life, many of which hardly break one-hundred pages. Men, marriage, the history of France, Alzheimer’s, mothers, and fathers all get the icy, fragmentary treatment.