A Conversation

An illuminating conversation between Nobel Prize-winning author Annie Ernaux and esteemed sociologist and educator Rose-Marie Lagrave offering invaluable insights from both their lives and work.

More than a dialogue or a debate, these conversations between Ernaux and Lagrave touch on many subjects, from the feminist future to each woman’s class histories as seen through the prism of the socio-historic transformations of the postwar period. One an author and the other a sociologist, their conversations go back and forth between lived experience and analysis, and a richness emerges of care and mutual respect and mutual recognition.

Acknowledging a debt to Pierre Bourdieu and his concepts of class transfuge (defection), domination and distinction, a frescoe emerges of the last 70 years in France, including references to Virginia Woolf, Marguerite Duras, Richard Hoggart, Raymond Aron, and Simone de Beauvoir.

These conversations began as a round-table discussion on May 26, 2021. A follow-up conversation occurred on March 24, 2022. A Conversation amounts to an extraordinary expression in book form of solidarity and friendship between two legendary figures who rose above their working class origins while at the same time remaining true to them.