February Memoir of the Month: Getting Lost

Annie Ernaux's diary entries chronicle her brief affair with a younger man.

Getting Lost

by Annie Ernaux

French writer Annie Ernaux recounts her affair with a Russian diplomat she met while on a writer’s junket to Moscow in the late 1980s. He is posted in Paris, and they continue to see each other when he comes to town for work. He is thirty-five and married. She is forty-eight and divorced.

Each diary entry details the day and time of his calls and visits, yet more space is devoted to his absence and her desperate worry that each visit will be his last. He is opaque to her. We cannot tell how much she means to him because she doesn’t know the answer herself. She is constantly hedging her bets, downplaying his need for her, almost as if she is preparing herself for his inevitable departure. He inhabits all levels of her psyche, and she dreams of him often.

I began to see the world through Ernaux’s eyes, desperately wanting S. to call and feeling immense relief when he does. Like her, I am confused by his absences and attempt to find reasons for them, even outside of her own words. If he doesn’t call her for fourteen days, he must not care for her. Can a man feel that much physical attraction and not care for the woman on a deeper level? I wondered.

Her diary entries read like an addiction. She needs one more hit of him to sustain her. But her cravings always return, each time stronger than the last. The real question for us all: Is the intense (once-in-a-lifetime) passion worth the misery?

We know they don’t stay together. The book’s introduction details the dread she feels when she calls him at the embassy and the operator tells her he has returned to Moscow:

I felt as if I’d heard this sentence before, over the phone. The words were not the same but they had the same meaning, the same weight of horror, and were just as impossible to believe. Later I remembered the announcement of my mother’s death, three and a half years earlier, how the nurse at the hospital had said: “Your mother passed away this morning after breakfast.”

Some may find her diary entries repetitive. I’ll admit, I skimmed the last twenty pages in which she writes almost exclusively about her dreams. Like Ernaux, I no longer wanted to continue after S. has departed and there is no hope of ever seeing him again.

Check out Lithub’s aggregated book reviews for Getting Lost. Although I liked this book, I cannot argue with critic Claire Lowden’s unfavorable review which states, “... mostly she describes herself waiting in agony for him to arrive, then lamenting his departure and fretting that the affair is over until his next call ... In between she describes her dreams, which are not interesting ...”