From photos and lingering memories of her life’s events, using words and recollections of certain people, places, or things, Annie Ernaux expresses the passage of time in Les années from the postwar era to today. What distinguishes her autobiography from others’ is a willingness to abandon subjectivity for a more impersonal and collective point of view. The result is an incomparable account, intensely moving, in which nostalgia for the past is replaced by an exacting interest in presenting things as they happened, and as they went by.