Simple Passion

The Anatomy of Waiting

Simple Passion opens with an image: Ernaux watching a pornographic film and realizing that what she sees on screen bears a resemblance to what she has been living. From 1988 to 1990, she was obsessed with a man she calls A., a married diplomat from Eastern Europe. The obsession had a structure. She waited for him to call. When he called, she organized her life around the visit. When he left, she began waiting again.

What makes Ernaux’s account extraordinary is the refusal of psychology. She does not explain the obsession, trace its origins, or analyze the man who produced it. She records it with the same flat precision she applies to the social world of her childhood, to the grocery-café her parents ran, to the class machinery of postwar France. The experience of waiting—checking the phone, unable to concentrate on anything else, canceling plans that might keep her from being available when he called—is described as a scientist might describe an experiment, with Ernaux as both observer and subject.

This clinical vocabulary does not distance the reader. It does the opposite: by refusing to dress the experience in psychological explanation or apologetic framing, Ernaux makes the waiting immediate and recognizable. Readers who have waited for a call understand exactly what she is describing. The precision is the intimacy.

Female Desire Without Apology

Simple Passion was published in France in 1991 and immediately provoked controversy—not because the subject matter was shocking, but because of how Ernaux wrote about it. Female desire, in the French literary tradition, had been written by men or written by women with at least a gesture toward irony or ambivalence. Ernaux’s account is neither. She is not ashamed of the obsession, not amused by it, not performing distance. She simply describes what it was like to be in it.

The closest comparison in French literature is Marguerite Duras’s The Lover—another account of erotic fixation written by a woman without apology. But where Duras mythologizes her desire, transforms it into something lyrical and timeless, Ernaux keeps hers resolutely material. She notes what she was wearing, what she cooked, what music was playing. The obsession is situated in ordinary domestic life, which makes it more, not less, disturbing.

When Ernaux received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2022, Simple Passion was often cited as the book that had most unsettled readers, that had named something previously unnameable in the experience of women who desire. That unsettling has not aged.

The Ernaux Method

Simple Passion is not an isolated experiment. It belongs to the body of work Ernaux built across four decades by applying the methods of sociology and ethnography to the materials of autobiography. The same approach that she used to reconstruct the class world of her father in A Man’s Place and the social shame of her childhood in Shame is applied here to the phenomenology of erotic waiting.

The class dimension is present even in Simple Passion, though less foregrounded than in her other books. A. is a diplomat from Eastern Europe—a figure of difference, of elsewhere, of a world Ernaux cannot fully access. The obsession is not only erotic but social: he represents something outside the world she came from and the world she has arrived at through education. Ernaux’s class consciousness runs through all her work, even when the subject seems purely personal.

Simple Passion is the shortest of her major books—eighty pages—and the one that most purely demonstrates her method. It is a good entry point for readers new to Ernaux, and a crucial text for those who want to understand what she was doing across her entire career.

Our rating: 4.0/5 — A landmark in writing about female desire and the shortest, most concentrated demonstration of the Ernaux method. Read it in one sitting; think about it for weeks.