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The Reader Credit...Eglon van der Neer

By Molly Young

Dear readers,

“This one is INTENSE,” said the bookseller who rang up my copy of Annie Ernaux’s “The Use of Photography.” A shiver transited up and down my spine — a bookseller outburst is as good an omen as a four-leaf clover or an egg with a double yolk.

“In what way is it intense?” I asked.

“You’ll see,” she demurred.

Naturally her coyness functioned as a reading accelerant; I revved home and started the book minutes after purchase. “Intense” was accurate. It is a text better rated in units of pulse measurement than in English words, though I’ve tried my hardest below.

—Molly

“The Use of Photography,”by Annie Ernaux and Marc Marie

Nonfiction, 2005 (in French) or 2024 (in English)

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Ernaux is our pre-eminent intimate observer, a woman who invented a genre that hybridizes fiction, memoir and sociology. There is no sharper chronicler of class in contemporary letters, no writer more relentlessly attendant to the details of speech, dress, comportment and trajectory that tether us to our origins.