Annie Ernaux won the 2022 Nobel Prize in literature for the “courage and clinical acuity with which she uncovers the roots, estrangements, and collective restraints of personal memory.” The French author has made a career of writing with insightful precision about the commonplace happenings of life. As her quote here suggests, it’s not so much the things that have happened in her life, but what she does with them, that make her a treasure of the literary world.