The publication of L'Atelier noir, a writer's diary covering the years 1982 to 2007, a ‘journal de fouilles,’ wherein Ernaux ‘expose … les doutes, les hésitations … tout ce travail de taupe creusant d'interminables galeries,’ is regarded by the author as a difficult act. This concern with exteriorization or self-exposure will be explored here with reference to the genesis, structure, and style of L'Evénement, published in 2000, centered on the abortion Ernaux underwent in December– January 1963–64, which had already been at the heart of her first published work, the novel Les Armoires vides (1974). Some sightlines will be offered by parallels with Michel Leiris and Marguerite Duras, and, in the later part of the essay, with ideas on self-exposure in Pierre Bourdieu, Judith Butler, and Jean-Luc Nancy. Underlying these reflections is the challenge memorably articulated by Susan Suleiman in Risking Who One Is, and few writers are more intrepid in this regard than Annie Ernaux.

Awaiting the reader of L'Atelier noir—and indeed the author, when she decided to transcribe a ‘grimoire’ of sheets piled up over 25 years— is the revelation that most of Ernaux's dozen books, from La Place in 1984 to L'Usage de la photo in 2005, are in some respect circumstantial writings. All, including Passion simple and Une femme, had been written and published with some urgency, interrupting or delaying—this is the key point—the major project, sketched out as early as the 1970s (its origin is twice dated to the year 1975), of a book that would record the lifetime of an individual woman in its relation to history. That book, we now know, would eventually see the light of day as Les Années, in 2009, where the endeavor to embrace a whole life is precisely concerned with the links between the intimate and the ‘extimate,’ the singular and the collective. L'Atelier noir makes us privy to the genesis of the project that would become Les Années; indeed, in the preface Ernaux observes that she was able to use this writer's diary to retrace, within the text of Les Années, that work's origins and evolution.