‘The strangest thing about jealousy is that it can populate an entire city – the whole world – with a person you may never have met.’ These words set the framework for The Possession, a striking portrait of a woman after a love affair has ended. Annie Ernaux pulls the reader through every step of jealousy, of a woman’s need to know who has replaced her in a lost beloved’s life. Ernaux’s writing, characteristically gorgeous in its precision, depicts the all too familiar human tendency to seek control and certainty after rejection.
The Possession
Translated by Anna Moschovakis
French paperback with flaps, 48 pages
Published 22 May 2025
The Possession
Translated by Anna Moschovakis
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I have always wanted to write as if I would be gone when the book was published. To write as if I were about to die – no more judges. Even if it’s an illusion, perhaps, to believe that truth comes only by way of death.
The first thing I did after waking up was grab his cock – stiff with sleep – and hold still, as if hanging onto a branch. I’d think, ‘as long as I’m holding this, I am not lost in the world’. Now, when I think about the significance of that sentence, it seems to me that what I meant was there is nothing to wish for but this, to have my hand wrapped around this man’s cock.
Now he’s in the bed of another woman. Maybe she makes the same gesture, stretching out her hand and grabbing his cock. For months, I have had a vision of this hand and have felt that it was mine.
And yet I was the one who had left W, several months earlier, after six years together – as much out of boredom as from an inability to give up my freedom, reclaimed after eighteen years of marriage, for the shared life he so strongly desired from the start. We continued to talk on the phone; we saw each other from time to time. He called me one evening, told me he was moving out of his studio, he was going to be living with a woman. From then on there would be rules about calling each other (only on his mobile phone) and about seeing each other (no nights or weekends). I was gripped by a sense of disaster, out of which something else emerged. At that moment, the existence of this other woman took hold of me. All of my thoughts passed through her.
This woman filled my head, my chest and my gut; she was always with me, she took control of my emotions. At the same time, her omnipresence gave my life a new intensity. It produced stirrings that I had never felt before, released a kind of energy, powers of imagination I didn’t know I had; it held me in a state of constant, feverish activity.
I was, in both senses of the word, possessed.
This state kept my daily troubles and cares at bay. In a way, it placed me outside the grip of life’s usual mediocrity. But any reflection that politics or current events would normally arouse in me was lost, too. I’ve tried and tried: apart from the Concorde crashing after take-off into a certain Hotelissimo de Gonesse, nothing in the world from the summer of 2000 left behind a memory.
There was suffering, on the one hand; and on the other, a mind incapable of applying itself to anything but the testimony and analysis of that suffering.
I absolutely had to know her name, her age, her profession, her address. I discovered that these details by which society defines a person’s identity, which we so easily dismiss as irrelevant to truly knowing someone, are in fact essential. They were the only way for me to extract a physical and social type from the undifferentiated mass of womankind; to conjure up a body, a lifestyle; to construct the image of an individual person. And as soon as he told me – grudgingly – that she was forty-seven years old; that she was a professor, divorced with a sixteen-year-old daughter; and that she lived on avenue Rapp in the 7th arrondissement, a silhouette emerged of a trim woman in a crisp blouse, her hair impeccably styled, preparing for class at a desk in a softly lit bourgeois apartment.
The number 47 took on a strange materiality. I saw the two digits, giant, all around me. I began to see women solely for their position in the march of time and of the ageing process, the effects of which I would compare to my own. Any woman who appeared to fall between forty and fifty years old and who dressed with the requisite ‘elegant simplicity’ of the finer neighbourhoods became a stand-in for the other woman.
I discovered that I hated all female professors – though I myself had been one, and many of my friends still were. I found them aggressive, unyielding: a return to the perception I’d had in secondary school when I was so intimidated by my women teachers I thought I would never be able to do what they did, to be like them. I saw the body of my enemy replicated in every member of the teaching body, which had never worn its name so well.
In the metro, any woman in her forties carrying a shopping bag was ‘her’, and just to look at her was to suffer. I felt the indifference of these women to my gaze, the way one would rise in a rather brisk, decisive motion from her seat and exit the train at a station (the name of which I would mentally take note) – it was like a denial of my being, a way for this woman, whom I’d taken throughout the train ride to be W’s new lover, to give me the finger.
(…)
‘Annie Ernaux manifestly believes in the liberating force of writing. Her work is uncompromising and written in plain language, scraped clean. And when she with great courage and clinical acuity reveals the agony of the experience of class, describing shame, humiliation, jealousy or inability to see who you are, she has achieved something admirable and enduring.’
— Anders Olsson, chair of the Nobel Committee
Praise for Getting Lost
‘Annie Ernaux writes memoir with such generosity and vulnerable power that I find it difficult to separate my own memories from hers long after I’ve finished reading.’
— Catherine Lacey, author of Biography of X
‘Like Anna Karenina and Madame Bovary, Ernaux’s affair should be counted as one of the great liaisons of literature…. I suspect the book will become a kind of totem for lovers: a manual to help them find their centre when, like Ernaux, they are lost in love. All her books have the quality of saving frail human details from oblivion. Together they tell, in fragments, the story of a woman in the twentieth century who has lived fully, sought out pain and happiness equally and then committed her findings truthfully on paper. Her life is our inheritance.’
— Ankita Chakraborty, Guardian
‘Getting Lost is a feverish book. It’s about being impaled by desire, and about the things human beings want, as opposed to the things for which they settle … it’s one of those books about loneliness that, on every page, makes you feel less alone.’
— Dwight Garner, New York Times
‘From the very first lines, we feel ourselves, like her, caught up in the vertigo of waiting, obsessed by the telephone that never rings, time that passes too quickly and the meetings that become less frequent. Love, death and literature are constantly intertwined in this story that plunges us into the intimacy of a couple, without ever giving us the impression of being voyeurs.’
— Pascale Frey, Elle
Born in 1940, Annie Ernaux grew up in Normandy, studied at Rouen University, and later taught at secondary school. From 1977 to 2000, she was a professor at the Centre National d’Enseignement par Correspondance. In 2017, Annie Ernaux was awarded the Marguerite Yourcenar Prize for her life’s work. In 2022, she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Anna Moschovakis is a poet, novelist and translator. She is the author of the novels An Earthquake Is a Shaking of the Surface of the Earth, Participation and Eleanor, or, The Rejection of the Progress of Love. Her translation of David Diop’s novel At Night All Blood Is Black won the 2021 International Booker Prize. She has also translated Albert Cossery’s The Jokers, Bresson on Bresson, and (with Christine Schwartz-Harley) Marcelle Sauvaget’s Commentary.
