The Years is a memoir that spans the life of Annie Ernaux from 1941 to 2006. The first sentence is efectively four pages long. It is insanely relatable. This is somewhat shocking given that I was alive for less than fifteen years of that interval and that I am not a French woman. Ernaux wrote the memoir in the third person we with the exception of a handful of passages that use she. The passages that use she serve as transitions between different epochs in the narative and ground you in details that feel more concrete and explicity about Ernaux’s life than that of the abstract composite of her generation. The book is slim at 231 pages, but it is dense with passages that made me go “aha!” or “yes!” I highlighted 52 pages worth of these passages so I could read them again later… Every few pages I would see a nugget and think to myself, “I have to mention this in my summary!” But, Ernaux summarizes the book best in the last nine pages, the first eight of which comprise the last passage that uses she. Read this book.