Shame in Annie Ernaux's Auto-Sociobiographical Stories

On July 9, 2026, Sarah Carlotta Hechler—who recently earned her doctorate from Freie Universität Berlin with a dissertation on the complete works of Annie Ernaux and is currently affiliated with the Centre Marc Bloch in Berlin—gave a lecture on shamelessness in Annie Ernaux’s autobiographical narratives. The event took place as part of Dr. Cora Rok’s seminar titled “Shame and First-Person Narratives: From Rousseau to Ernaux.”

Nobel Prize laureate Annie Ernaux is known for her unsparing portrayal of the social milieu from which she came—a milieu from which she has worked her way out or, as she puts it, “written her way out.” In her quasi-ethnographic reconstruction of lower-middle-class social worlds, she analyzes not only social but also gender-based power relations.

Using selected text passages, Sarah C. Hechler demonstrated the extent to which shame is a constant companion—a driving force behind her writing—in Ernaux’s work. This is evident not only in *La Honte* but also in works such as *La Place* and *L’Événement*. There, Ernaux describes experiences of exposure and humiliation, such as in her recollection of how her homeroom teacher and classmates saw her mother at the front door in a dirty bathrobe. The garment, which was actually meant to cover and protect, reveals through its visual eloquence what would have been better left hidden. It is the gaze of others that Ernaux describes here and that she accepts; that is precisely where the shame lies. As Hechler emphasizes, her refusal to adopt a clearly subjective perspective of the narrating “I” is striking. Instead, Ernaux recounts her experiences seemingly impassively, “shamelessly.” She deliberately refrains from evoking empathy, thereby creating a contrast to the often angry language of her early works and to class-struggle texts of a similar nature. According to Hechler, Ernaux does not offer a reading that allows for immediate identification; rather, a matter-of-fact, controlled tone predominates. This tone not only serves to “make the unspeakable of that time speakable,” but also represents a way of exposing oneself to one’s own shame in a controlled manner.