Annie Ernaux’s non-fiction work, “Getting Lost,” consists of her 1989-90 diaries which were exclusively focused on her relationship with a married, Russian diplomat during the period that he was posted to Paris. I say relationship, but really specifically mean their sexual encounters that took place at her apartment about once a week for the months that the affair lasted, ending when he was recalled to Moscow.

Despite recognizing the many things that make this text worthy of publication and discussion, I should say right off that I found reading this book to be excruciating. The narrative is repetitive, granular, infuriating, and obsessive. Ernaux lives for her lover’s visit and literally cannot speak about anything else. This is the entire book!

The text consists of her questioning whether he will be telephoning her to arrange to come to her, whether he will actually show up, what time he will be coming, whether he will really come or not, the likelihood that he probably won’t come, how this is clearly a sign that he has lost interest in her, he won’t show up, he hates her, it’s over, he has lost his desire. Then, the next entry: Of course, he came exactly when he said he would, it was amazing, the sex was incredible, she loves him, and now let’s focus on obsessing about next time he will come. She drives herself insane with these circular, ritualistic patterns of thoughts. She spends hours and hours thinking about him, planning to see him, or torturing herself with doubt and misgivings. Reading this kind of unrelenting deeply repetitive droning truly felt at times like torture. I kept asking myself why I was continuing to read. Why not put the damn book down?

The answer to this question is that although I found the author’s voice in these diaries to be often frustrating, I also found it, if I am being fair, to be intensely unfettered and deeply committed to raw truth and absolute lack of artifice. I know that intense irritation with the narrator of a novel is not reason enough to put down a book (or else who would ever be able to bear to read Lolita?), and the same must be true for non-fiction if there is anything to be gained beyond simple entertainment. The more that I read this selection of journal entries, the more I found myself thinking seriously about the nature of sexual obsession, about desire, about the changing seasons of physicality in one’s life, and about the many changes in sexual mores over the last forty years.

Putting aside my distaste at Ernaux’s weird passivity in this text, I do recognize that she is pledging allegiance to full disclosure in articulating a complex human experience: Desire. The book gives weight to the easy way in which desire can lead to obsession. Desire as an impulse can fully bewitch. The title “Getting Lost” is apt for the kind of deep, icy plunge that Ernaux takes into the realm of pure physical obsession, pure emotion.

I expect that critics will likely make a big deal about the age difference of the novel. Ernaux was in her late forties at the time of the affair, and her lover was about thirty. One can certainly spin the argument that somehow having a woman’s perspective on such a relationship is a breath of fresh air since there are so many relationships in literature and life with older men and young women. Okay, fair enough, but this narrative is hardly a win for feminism. The age-old imbalance is still creakily evident as Ernaux surrenders all agency, and is passive to such an extreme that she seems to insist that her lover call all the shots; her self-assigned job seems to be simply to marinate in her own feverish desire for him and then wait anxiously for him to show up—all the while questioning her own desire. Physical desire links them; she calls this love, he does not.

And age does play a role here: Ernaux finds that having a younger lover reminds her of her own youth and youthful relationships. Clearly, her lover’s body is a powerful trigger for her desire. And, she notes that while he is likely drawn to her fame and cultural cache as a well-known French writer, he is most attractive to her because of his body and his connection to the USSR, which she seems somewhat obsessed by. Strangely, there seemed to be little conversation between the lovers about ideas or about their work except on the shallowest level—she was a professor and well-known author in France at this time and he was a mid-level diplomat.

I found the end of the diary to be the most interesting, after her lover leaves for Moscow, the diary continues into the next year. Ernaux initially mourns, but then, little by little, her diary becomes more interesting, more rounded, more filled with ideas and musings. It is as though she is finally coming out of a trance.

I listened to the audio version of this memoir and highly recommend it as the reader was absolutely perfect at conveying the intimacy of the text. My thanks to the publisher, Dreamscape Media, and to NetGalley for the ARC.