The journal Annie Ernaux kept while having a covert relationship with a younger, married attach? to the Soviet embassy in Paris for a year and a half is titled Getting Lost. This encounter served as the basis for her novel, Simple Passion, but here her language is direct and unadulterated. In these journals, it is 1989, Annie is divorced, has two adult kids, lives in a suburb of Paris, and is getting close to fifty years old. Ernaux seemed to live only in hope of these rendezvous when her lover leaves the city to visit her there. She is unable to write, trudges through her various other obligations in the world while preoccupied, and waits for his next call; she exists solely to experience desire and anticipate the upcoming encounter. Lauded for her spare prose, Ernaux here removes all artifice, her writing pared down to its most naked and vulnerable. Translated brilliantly for the first time by Alison L. Strayer, Getting Lost is a haunting record of a woman in the grips of love, desire and despair.