Cleaned Out

Cleaned Out is the first novel by the French writer Annie Ernaux, published in 1974 by Éditions Gallimard. Ernaux drew on her own experience: the text is set during the wait for an abortion she underwent in 1964, an episode she would return to years later in The Event (2000).

The narrative takes the point of view of Denise Lesur, a modern literature student who stands in for the author herself. While she waits in the space that confines her, Denise recalls her childhood and adolescence. The structure follows the course of memory: the young woman's present surfaces intermittently, while the past occupies most of the text. By concentrating the action on a single wait, Ernaux creates an intense unity of place that lets the narrative move back and forth between what was and what is.

Her portrait of childhood in Normandy introduces themes she would develop throughout her work: the decisive figure of the mother, to whom she later dedicated A Woman's Story, and that of the father, the subject of A Man's Place. The novel shows the clash between two social worlds: that of her parents, former workers who ran a bar, and the bourgeois milieu she increasingly moves into as her studies advance. The tension between them produces contradictory feelings—a mixture of shame, contempt and affection for her family—that would become a constant in her writing.

Stylistically, Cleaned Out, like the two books that followed it, is marked by a prose charged with emotion. Ernaux often uses set phrases, popular language and even slang, along with an expressive punctuation that relies heavily on ellipses. This direct voice anticipates the method she would later refine: an autobiographical writing that joins intimate experience to social history, and which has made her one of the most influential voices in contemporary French literature.