In this atypical autobiographical novel, Annie Ernaux looks back on an episode in her adult life when she fell madly in love with a married foreign diplomat. This secret relationship completely changed her and she explores in this book the irrational and uncontrollable springs of passion and physical love. “From September of last year, I did nothing but wait for a man” she writes, as if longing was the proof of being in loved. We first wonder about the feminist position of the writer before understanding the contradictions inherent in the position of the contemporary woman. In the manner of Marcel Proust, it is the writing that comes to put the right words on this experience and show that the writer is first and foremost a woman available to the intensity of emotions beyond any moral judgment.

We read this novel in the summer of 2021.