A Noteworthy Book in the New York Times Annie Ernaux captures the lusts and humiliations of a human heart enmeshed in a passionate passion in her simple, uncompromising language. An unnamed narrator strives to chronicle the emotional and physical path of her two-year romance with a married foreigner while blurring the lines between reality and fiction. Every phrase, incident, and person either helps her feel connected to her beloved or is subject to her chilly indifference. She pursues the truth behind a life that was lived totally for someone else with courage and accuracy, and she is successful in finding it in the fragments of that existence's aftermath.