Name: Getting Lost
ISBN: 9781913097004

Annie Ernaux

Getting Lost is the diary kept by Annie Ernaux during the year and a half she had a secret love affair with a younger, married man, a haunting record of a woman in the grips of love, desire and despair.

Getting Lost

The rating does not seem entirely fair but I keep going back and forth.

A topic that I never would have expected to have me so enraptured or to allow me to take it so seriously (she talks about losing her contact lense and finding it on his penis!) yet not for a second did I feel judgemental or annoyed at Ernaux's actions and thoughts as described within her diary of this period of her life. The excerpts of her diary feel like going through a dream, single-minded and a little disjointed, a combination of fleeting, yet persistent thoughts; and then - an awakening, sharp and dreary. This is exactly what infatuation feels like, and Ernaux captures it on page so precisely.

The rating does not seem entirely fair but I keep going back and forth.

A topic that I never would have expected to have me so enraptured or to allow me to take it so seriously (she talks about losing her contact lense and finding it on his penis!) yet not for a second did I feel judgemental or annoyed at Ernaux's actions and thoughts as described within her diary of this period of her life. The excerpts of her diary feel like going through a dream, single-minded and a little disjointed, a combination of fleeting, yet persistent thoughts; and then - an awakening, sharp and dreary. This is exactly what infatuation feels like, and Ernaux captures it on page so precisely.