In Writing Life: Annie Ernaux Through the Eyes of High School Students, Claire Simon proposes an unusual perspective: not that of experts, critics, or veteran readers, but that of teenagers discovering for the first time the disarming force of Annie Ernaux. That simple choice shifts the center of the documentary toward a space where literature becomes an immediate, almost urgent mirror, inviting each young person to think about themselves, their family, and the things that are rarely spoken aloud. Ernaux’s work—so direct, so clear, so rigorously honest—acquires an unexpected resonance here: in classrooms, playgrounds, and streets across different corners of France and French Guiana, the writer ceases to be a consecrated figure and becomes instead an intimate presence that stirs memories, tensions, and still-forming desires.

What appears again and again is the sense that Ernaux’s texts are not read like any other novel, but like a door opening onto one’s own life. Her ability to narrate from the everyday—a supermarket, a clandestine relationship, a growing distance from her parents—allows these teenagers to recognize themselves in her words, even when their historical or social circumstances differ. Ernaux writes from memory, but that memory, however rooted in its time and place, reverberates in those who are trying to understand who they are and how they were shaped. In the classroom, students comment on passages about shame, desire, class, and social impositions; and yet the true focus is not the author herself, but the echo her writing provokes in them. Literature becomes a territory where vulnerability is risked, where fears and also ambitions can be shared.

The question of art’s purpose runs underneath it all: why do we write, why do we read, why can something as fragile as a sentence guide us through our contradictions? The teenagers do not respond from theory but from immediate experience: for some, writing is a way to understand their origins; for others, a means of naming impulses they had not yet learned to articulate. Sometimes their reflections emerge spontaneously, almost chaotically, but their sincerity reveals what matters: that art can be a space of freedom when everyday life is still shaped by family expectations, economic limits, or the weight of a conflicted identity.

Simon patiently observes those moments when a student recognizes the silent violence of class differences that Ernaux describes, or when a girl explains how a passage about the female body helps her think about her own right to choose. By not intervening or explaining, the director allows reading to become conversation and conversation to become an act of self-discovery. There arises a powerful idea: that literature, far from being an isolated object or a school obligation, works as a tool for interpreting the world, dismantling prejudices, and acknowledging that every life is crossed by layers of memory, pain, and desire.

One of the most moving aspects is seeing young people from such different places find points of connection between their own stories and the voice of a woman who wrote about a France of another era. From Parisian suburbs to Cayenne, passing through Toulouse, Ernaux’s words are read under the light of varied social contexts—some marked by colonial legacies, others by economic tensions or by the feeling of not fitting imposed models. Thus the writer’s work unfolds as a democratic territory: each reader extracts something different, interprets from their own position, mentally rewrites what they have read. Literature is no longer a fixed object but a living organism.

Outside the classroom, Simon records conversations that continue on benches, at bus stops, in corridors where life seems to run without pause. In these moments, reading stops being a school activity and blends with youthful intimacy: friendships, romantic doubts, small rebellious gestures. The students do not just analyze texts; they look at themselves through them. Suddenly, a young woman confesses that she might want to write, that she feels words could help her order what she carries inside. It is not a tribute to Ernaux but proof that a book can awaken a voice.

Ultimately, what emerges is art’s ability to circulate across generations, to be reinterpreted, to continue questioning those who come after. Writing Life shows how texts written decades ago gain new vitality when encountered by those still discovering their place in the world. And in doing so, it reminds us that literature does not belong to the past or to specialists, but to any reader willing to open themselves to it. There, in that simple and profound encounter, is where the life of writing truly begins.