Exteriors

In Exteriors Ernaux concentrates, not on the essential details of a relationship with a family member or lover as before, but on ephemeral encounters within the larger circle of one's environment and the hundreds of strangers who inhabit it. Here she captures the feeling of contemporary living on the outskirts of a great city: tortured, chaotic, lyrical, and powerfully alive. Exteriors is in many ways the most ecstatic of Ernaux's books, the first in which she appears largely free of the haunting personal relationships she has written about so powerfully elsewhere, the first in which she is able to leave her past behind her.
The author describes the experience of writing Exteriors this way: "Between 1985 and 1992 I copied down sights and conversations, on the commuter train, in supermarkets, and downtown in the planned community where I live. I think I wanted in this way to hold on to some part of this epoch and to the people one encounters but once, whose existence you briefly touch, disengaging a bit of their turmoil, anger, or pain."