What does the tension between memory and history—both personal and shared, the “I” and the “we”—teach us about both remembering and documenting our time spent? How do we view and engage with the past? Are memory and experience and memory and context intertwined? And how might we reconcile these?

Annie Ernaux, the France-based 2022 Nobel laureate for literature, earned fame and renown as a writer who is deeply entrenched in the power of memory—as a repository of lived experiences, as a cistern of hope and hearth, as an existential paradigm. When announcing the honor last fall, the Nobel Committee cited “the courage and clinical acuity with which she uncovers the roots, estrangements and collective restraints of personal memory.” Her masterpiece The Years, from 2008, recounts her own history and that of post-World War II France, and explores how the two narratives intertwined and diverged.

The Super 8 Years, an essay film she made with her son David Ernaux-Briot, premiered at the New York Film Festival days before she was anointed the 2022 Nobel laureate. The Super 8 Years spans the 1970s and early 1980s and might be construed as a cinematic investigation into that period through home movies. The Years covers those decades within its exploration from 1941 to 2006.

Watching The Super 8 Years in tandem with The Years gave me a deeper insight into both works—and into Ernaux’s sensibility. Ernaux’s two works together, by overlaying images on her literary self-examinations, allow her to construct both a remembrance of things past and a reconstruction and reconsideration of their remembrance, resulting in, to this reader/viewer, a diptych-esque response to Proust’s masterpiece.

The Years is a reconciliation with the history of France as Ernaux lived it, observed it, and processed it—from her point of entry during World War II through the waning days of colonialism; from the presidential administration of Charles de Gaulle to that of Jacques Chirac; during teetering toward and away from socialism; amid persistent undercurrents of classism and racism.

Ernaux is ambivalent about herself; she refers to herself as “we,” rather than “I,” sublimating a part of herself and blending in with the collective. Hers is a foot soldier’s view of history, and a quest to find one’s role and assert one’s place within it.

The Years approaches memory as a fluid force. In a section that takes us to 1953 and 1954, for example, Ernaux lists:

-the great train strike of the summer of ’53

-the fall of Dien Bien Phu

-Stalin’s death announced on the radio, one cold morning, in March, just before children left for school

and juxtaposes these moments in world history with her own childhood memories, some idyllic:

-the Tour de France passing through her town

-embroidering a napkin ring

some bittersweet:

-reading the summaries of films she will not see and books she will not read

and some harrowing:

-The scene between her parents … when her father tried to kill her mother, dragging her to the cellar … where they kept the sickle planted.

In a way, The Years and Ernaux’s writing of it are acts of alchemy—making the past present and the present past, morphing them together with an artist’s light, illuminating the crevices, brightening the corners. It is not that she’s completely oblivious to the world as it turns; it’s that she is a work in progress—observing and engaging that parallel evolution, while reckoning her own. They are mirror and window.

It makes sense, then, that The Super 8 Years picks up so deftly where the book leaves off.  Ernaux and Ernaux-Briot stitched the film together using home movies chronicling family life: vacations, and the mundanities of middle class and middle age in 1970s and 1980s France. The movies are grainy, and they are silent.

Ernaux adds the music, environmental effects, and narration—again, using “she/her” and “we/us,” as if the Annie she beholds on celluloid is a doppelganger, filmed against her will. Philippe, her then-husband, documented the family’s domestic life and its attendant milestones such as birthday parties and holiday gatherings, as well as vacations to Morocco, pre-Pinochet Chile, Albania, Egypt, Spain, and the Soviet Union, among others. Fifty years later, Ernaux, as narrator, assesses her engagement with those places in Cold War history in the past—both as vacation destinations and as validations of her progressive leanings—and from her present perspective, where she questions her place in a postcolonial, vastly changed landscape.

Philippe operates the camera at all times. He is the scenarist, auteur, director, producer, cinematographer. Annie is the unwitting protagonist—mildly annoyed, always self-conscious. It’s an engagement that perhaps betrays the fragile state of their marriage. He would later leave the footage with her, and take the camera with him.

When one engages the home movies as sui generis, Annie is the subject, frozen in a moment in time when she was vulnerable to Philippe’s camera. Her truth lingered beyond the frame. But fortified by her discerning narration 50 years later, The Super 8 Years is a reclamation process—a sort of rescue by interrogation and recontextualization. Ernaux the narrator and future Nobel laureate considers her cinematic self, whose career as an eventual literary icon is in its nascent stages, as defined by a patriarchal apparatus. On film, she is a homemaker, wife, and mother, navigating her way through the trappings of womanhood.

These are images of an irretrievable past, of a context that no longer exists, within a disintegrating marriage. As in The Years, Ernaux is probing memories, of her narrative and of “our” broader history.

Ernaux’s memory of her experiences, these chapters in her life, do not always match what she beholds in the footage. The act of remembering and remembrance is an act of editing and subconscious omission, brought to fruition in film. It is also an affirmation of self. Ernaux has in the end reconciled history and memory, collectively and individually. She, as “we,” is the author, the writer, the scribe, the narrator/filmmaker. She, as “she,” in the photos and footage, is preserved in a past moment, yet beckoning the future self for a dialogue. “She” is past and everlasting, unrevivable, yet resurrected.

As the artist, Ernaux is an alchemist, a preservationist, a reanimator of a world that is just memory and history. She may not have answers to what the footage provides, to what the past beckons, but she has questions—for herself, for history, for us. And she leaves it up to us—the sum total of our personal narratives, our fictionalization of them, our collective history and our relations to and reconciliation with the filmed, written, and recorded records.

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In California’s Miracle Country.

Miracle Country is the title of Kendra Atleework’s new and magical memoir about her life in the Eastern Sierra. The book begins with the 2015 fire that decimated her 200-person hometown, Swall Meadows, north of Bishop and 7,000 feet above sea level (“marking the border between desert and sky”). And it is full of unforgettable stories about how disaster shaped and reshaped the Eastern Sierra broadly, and the Owens Valley in particular.

Atleework, in prose as beautiful as any writing ever devoted to our state, shows that fire and disaster aren’t the end. Apocalyptic events, in her telling, are really beginnings that can ground us, protect us, and even nurture us. Her oft-devastated home region, on California’s eastern edge, offers a preview of a post-apocalyptic life full of great beauty, deep meaning, and engrossing mysteries.

“I wondered what it meant to go to smoke,” she writes of the aftermath of that fire in Swall Meadows. “This land demands that you consider—makes you think you’ll find an answer, but you never can. And where do we turn after everything burns? What light do we find, or not find, just over the summit?”

Atleework’s life, and book, toggle between Swall Meadows, where she was raised, and Bishop, where she lives now. Bishop (population 4,000 in the city), is the only incorporated place in Inyo County, which covers an area larger than New Jersey. But her true subject is the high desert that is the Owens Valley, in her words “a long brown sliver of sagebrush and bitterbrush cupped between ranges—to the west, the stark granite escarpment of the Sierra Nevada, casting its rain shadow across our towns; to the east, the Whites and Inyos, those ancient desert mountains.”

She weaves stories of her family’s life navigating the Eastern Sierra’s climate extremes (from the dry valley up to snowbound Mammoth) with its two great apocalypses. The first was the taking of the region from its first indigenous inhabitants, the Paiutes, who called the valley “Payahuunadü” or land of flowing water. The second was the taking of that water, through the deceptions of William Mulholland, to serve Los Angeles, leaving Owens Valley and its 25,000 people with a dry lake bed of arsenic and mining chemicals that produces some of the world’s most hazardous dust storms.

Most accounts of the Owens Valley start and end with that crime and its resulting, ongoing legal fights. But Atleework, while unforgiving of the water theft (as a young adult in L.A., she counts the private swimming pools on Mulholland Drive and seeks out Mulholland’s grave at Forest Lawn), is more interested in appreciating the wonders of the valley left behind. “When the water went away, growth occurred someplace else,” she writes. “With water, Owens Valley might not be the country that drew my parents together for love of its strangeness.”

She appreciates the hiking and beauty of the mountains, but also the absence of people and enterprises—the kind of emptiness that is rare in California. She frequently quotes turn-of-the-century novelist and homesteader Mary Austin, who lived in the Valley and found it “forsaken of most things but beauty and madness and death and God.” Atleework even conveys an affection for the fires, droughts, floods, volcano-inspired earthquakes, and blizzards that often visit the Eastern Sierra, and have taught its people that this world is full of giant forces “from which we cannot protect ourselves or each other.” The best you can do is hold on tight to the nearby rocks.

“To be made careful is to be made grateful,” she writes. “Loss highlights all you have, just as absence in the desert highlights presence, until what little water we harbor glows.”

The most memorable character of this story, other than Atleework’s pilot-father and her late educator-mother, is a wind, the Sierra Wave, which gusts above 60 miles an hour and routinely knocks over big-rigs and pushes airplanes into mountains. Reading Miracle Country’s description of California as “this windy place that seems to be on fire half the time” felt fitting these past few weeks.

“On the beaches of the Pacific, gusts arrive laden with salt spray, whooshing with enough force to make your eyes water, a persistence perfect for launching kites,” Atleework writes of this wind that connects California. “By the time that breeze reaches Owens Valley, it has raced over the coastal range, up the western, windward flank of the Sierra Nevada, and it has turned powerful.”

While hiking, Atleework leans “into a gale so strong it negates the work of gravity and I can almost lie down on air.” So strong that the wind might be proof of the divine. “If God is ever present, if God can get in through the frames of our doors and the pores in our skin,” she writes, “then on this obsidian edge of California, God is the wind and the dust it carries.”

Looking down on our state from on-high, Atleework, now 31, zeroes in on its central paradox: “California is strange country, country of dearth—go there now, to almost any town or city, and find not enough water, of course, but also not enough jobs, not enough housing, not enough room in the jails and schools—yet California is known the world over as a place of excess in lifestyles, ideas, and dreams.”

She also has glimpsed its future, since climate change has shadowed her whole life, with the Eastern Sierra’s winters growing warmer, its fires bigger, its seasons more alike. As California lives through new apocalypse after new apocalypse, we’ll have to learn to go on and rebuild, as the Eastern Sierra already has, over and over.

Despite all the disasters, Atleework, after stints in Minnesota and Old Town San Diego, returns to the Eastern Sierra, and buys a house in Bishop. For all her fear of fire, she will keep wandering into the dry brush. The past, she concludes, has not entirely poisoned the future.

“Some who love this valley remember its first name: the land of flowing waters. Now we see it washed in fire,” she writes near the end of a book that might be the only truly wonderful thing about 2020. “We live in a landscape damaged beyond repair, and we see our loss magnified the world over. We are here regardless, learning how to keep an eye on mystery and miracle, where they flicker beside disaster.”

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At first, I hadn’t been so sure. When my filmmaker husband casually dropped the question, “What would you think of moving to L.A.?,” I sucked in a deep breath and felt my panic rise. I’d long been happily settled in San Francisco. On the other hand, I wanted to be flexible and supportive. I would finish writing my book in L.A., and he could cook up his big film plans somewhere closer to the action.

No one moves to L.A. without having seen it already. The movies, the Beach Boys, Rita Hayworth, the Pacific Ocean. It all seems so familiar that even for new arrivals it feels a bit like coming home. I convinced myself so completely that all would be well that by the day we signed our lease–what I had come to think of as the day of the jacarandas–even I saw an aura of glamour in our plans. But in a small corner of my mind, I felt something else lurking. It wasn’t until a few weeks later, after the moving guys had piled the last boxes onto our new living room floor, that something lit the fuse. I started to weep, and then to sob. I sat on the floor and crumbled. I realized what I had done. I had followed a man in pursuit of his ambitions. And I’d let myself be uprooted once again by someone else’s Hollywood dreams.

That had been the story of my childhood. My family had 13 addresses before I turned nine. At one point, we moved four times in 18 months. Time after time, my mother packed up a baby, then two, then three, and then toddlers and school kids and a house full of goods, to follow my handsome, narcissistic, and insecure father in pursuit of his ever-receding horizons. He worked in radio and television as talent. But he knew he was destined for bigger things–larger markets, better jobs. So he quit the ones he had and leapt for greener grass, which never turned out to be green enough. We were living in Wichita when he left us for Hollywood–which he knew was his destiny.

My father had grown up in Los Angeles, and his father, Leon Ceeley (his stage version of Seeley), was an actor who had landed one great role: Mr. Whitmore in the Marx Brothers’ A Day at the Races. I felt secretly proud of that family legacy, but it had also wrecked us. As we moved all across Colorado and then Kansas, my father was really chasing his father and his own Hollywood dream. He fed his ambitions on roles in summer stock and community theater, but they left him restless, unsatisfied. So the summer I was 12 he made one last try at Hollywood. He knew Clu Galager, he said, and Clu was going to help him get an audition. The whole family made the drive out west, and while my sisters, mother, and I stayed with relatives in Arizona, he went on to L.A. I remember the long drive back to Kansas as silent and tense. There was no more talk of Hollywood. And when we got home, my father packed up and left us for good.

The emotional plots of our childhood lie deeply rooted in our psyches and become the maps we follow as adults. I’d married a man who made movies, and now I’d followed him here. So in more ways than one, I had really come home. To my father’s home place, the source of his fantasies and the catalyst of my childhood suffering. His inheritance might have been the movies, but the bequest he’d made to me was a lack of roots and a memory of trauma that rose from the depths whenever I moved.

This was the story of the memoir I was writing, the one I planned to finish in L.A. I’d come to understand the toll my upended childhood years had taken. I ached for a sense of place but realized I had no deep attachment to anywhere, including Kansas, where I’d finally done my growing up. I hadn’t intended to make peace with my father, or to write about him. But he hovered at the margins from the day I wrote the first words of Chapter One, and by now he’d become a major character. But I still had the hardest chapters yet to write, the ones that would take me deep into the heart of my aching not only for place but for him. When he died in 1999, we hadn’t spoken in nearly a decade.

L.A. brought me face to face with the neighborhoods where my father had been a boy in the 1930s and 1940s. It seemed more than a coincidence. As the weeks went by and we settled in, it began to seem right. As I drove or walked through the city, I met my father at every turn. I often passed Hollywood High, where he’d gone to school. As I drove by houses from the ’30s and ’40s, I imagined he had lived in them during his own itinerant childhood (he’d had 17 addresses in L.A.). I thought of my grandfather when I passed MGM, where he had checked in for his scenes with Groucho. Every day brought me further into my father’s familiar world, the places that had shaped his mythology of self and the stories he’d told me as a child: Forest Lawn, Venice Beach, Santa Monica Pier.

Being there in the places that had belonged to the boy who would become my father turned me tender. It let me see him whole, in three dimensions. I came to understand that his suffering had roots in his own disrupted and often-moving family, and I came to understand the tug of L.A., the homing beacon that always lured him back from wherever we moved. Writing about his life in L.A., imagining him here, helped me forgive him, and then let him go.

I finished my book that first year in L.A. and then we stayed for another two. When my sabbatical ended, we began the long commute. For two years, I spent my weekdays in San Francisco, and my weekends, winter breaks, and summers in Los Angeles, learning by heart that long, straight stretch of I-5 in between. I had the joy of seeing the jacarandas bloom twice more. But no matter the season, whenever I neared the end of my drive, took the Highland exit and slowed into traffic, it always felt like coming home.

Buy the Book: Skylight Books, Amazon, Powell’s.

Tracy Seeley is the author of My Ruby Slippers: the Road Back to Kansas (2011). Her short nonfiction has appeared in journals such as Prairie Schooner and The Florida Review, and her essay “Cartographies of Change” was named a Notable Essay in The Best American Essays 2011. She lives in Oakland, California and teaches at the University of San Francisco.

*Photo courtesy of ccharmon.

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