Getting Lost

By: Annie Ernaux, Alison L. Strayer - translator

Narrated by: Tavia Gilbert

Getting Lost is the diary Annie Ernaux kept during the year and a half she had a secret love affair with a younger married man, a Russian diplomat. Her novel, Simple Passion, was based on this affair, but here her writing is immediate, unfiltered.

In these diaries, it is 1989, and Annie is divorced with two grown sons, living outside of Paris, and nearing fifty. Her lover escapes the city to see her there, and Ernaux seems to survive only in expectation of these encounters, saying “his desire for me is the only thing I can be sure of.” She cannot write; she trudges distractedly through her various other commitments in the world; she awaits his next call; she lives only to feel desire and for the next rendezvous. When he is gone and the desire has faded, she feels that she is a step closer to death.

Lauded for her spare prose, Ernaux here removes all artifice, her writing pared down to its most naked and vulnerable. Getting Lost is as strong a book as any she has written, a haunting, desperate view of a strong and successful woman who seduces a man only to lose herself in love and desire.

©2021, 2022 Gallimard, Paris; Translation by Alison L. Strayer (P)2023 Dreamscape Media

Book for Ernaux buffs

Ernaux is a great writer, brutally honest and fearless. But Getting Lost is for Ernaux buffs, unedited diary entries full of longing, lust, dreams and allusions to her previous oeuvre, often repetitive. There’s a shorter and more reader-friendly version of the same story. It’s called Simple Passion, start there

Wow.! I did expect more!

This was just reading someone’s diary… I could relate but expected much more substance! Nobel prize for a diary!?

Romantic stories of the other woman

Kind of repetitive but annie ernauxs journal made me feel safe tbh. Good to know i’m not the only one who has gone insane for a man who doesn’t care as much lol.

How did this win the Nobel Prize in Literature

I don’t know if it was the performance but this book is a travesty. Are the Nobel prize committee members all men who believe this desperation for a man by a woman is something that rings true of all women and captures their sense of self-worth or what but this was horrible. Perhaps if they had a french reader who read this journal with a french sensibility and with some level of ennui vs the reader who reads this with such a tone of desperation that I it was annoying from start to … well I couldn’t finish it. I might actually try reading it to finish it to see if a different voice gives it a different perspective. Thus far it reads like a bad, repetitive 13 year olds lovesick journal but if you add adult acts in it.

This was not good!

You’d like this if you enjoy a women talking for 5 hours about wanting her lover or having her lover. Worst book I’ve ever read or listened to!