I sat in a chair and stared at the cover for a long time. The title was Simple Passion. Simple. Passion. Put together, the words almost sound like a contradiction. Because nothing inside is simple. Annie Ernaux writes about an affair she had in her forties. The man was an Eastern European diplomat. Married. No plot. No dialogue. No description of his face or what he said. Only one thing: the waiting. Waiting for the phone to ring. Waiting for the weekend. Waiting for the moment he pushes the door open. She pulls apart every second of that waiting and stretches it across the page. I used to think a book like this would bore me. Halfway through, I realized I was breathing as fast as she was.
She lived a whole year inside the gaps between his visits
The “I” in the book has no name. Neither does the man. When he appears, he is only a shadow – one that comes and goes on schedule. But that shadow splits her life in two. Days with him. Days without him. On his days, she floats in warm water. She feels completely unguarded. On the other days, she collapses like a deflated balloon, sprawled on the floor, unable to lift a finger.
She did something absurd. Every time he left, she kept the sheets, the towels, the glass he drank from. She arranged them like an altar. She told herself his scent still clung to them. When the smell faded, she reached for the cologne he used to wear and sprayed it into the air. I almost laughed. But I couldn’t. Because I remembered doing something just as foolish. Rereading a whole chat history. Replaying his words inside my head, over and over. That kind of behavior knows no borders or age. It is only love in its most ordinary shape.
She sank, while standing on the shore watching herself go down
What made this book extraordinary was that Ernaux wrote from two places at once. One was the first-person “I” – the woman who had crumbled to dust for love. She guarded the phone all day, afraid to leave the room. At the grocery store, she calculated the minutes so she wouldn’t miss his call. He was one hour late, and her mind had already made a disaster film: He’s been in an accident.
Then there was the other voice. A cold one. Almost feelingless. A watcher’s voice. That watcher was also her. Suddenly she stepped out of the “woman waiting by the phone” and described her own state with quiet precision. She said: I am living through a classic passion. No different from what millions have lived through. It is not special. Not romantic. Barely worth mentioning. But she wrote it anyway. Because That ordinariness is what makes it worth remembering. The switching between these two views gave the book a strange temperature. It was both hot and cold. Hot from the naked, unguarded wanting. Cold from the calm, almost clinical self-dissection. The two temperatures stacked on top of each other. It read like someone crying and wiping her own tears at the same time.
After finishing this book, I thought differently about shame
We all assume it is embarrassing to make ourselves so small for another person. Right? Any one of these behaviors would fuel your friends’ gossip for years. But after reading Ernaux, I no longer felt the shame. Not because her actions became noble. Because of what she said:
This passion let me experience my own limit. At that limit, I touched something I would never have touched sitting in an office, shopping at a supermarket, exchanging pleasantries with a neighbor.
She admitted the truth: The woman who lost her mind for love was still part of her. The woman who bowed that low still wrote a book like this. The book was calm. Sharp. Merciless. It dissected that affair. The ability to dissect meant she now stood outside it. But the ache in every sentence – that ache meant she once stood deep inside.
You can read it while waiting for someone. You can read it while trying to forget someone. It will remind you of things you did not want to remember. But when you close the book, those things no longer feel like your baggage. They have become a few lines on a page. And you – you have turned to the next page.
