Summary

The second section of The Years opens with the description of a photo of two girls -- one of them the same girl mentioned in descriptions of previous photographs, the other, her sister -- standing on school grounds. As a teenager, the first girl yearned for a record player and read widely, bored by her family’s dinner conversations and daydreaming all the time. Discussions of the war had “entered the realm of private misfortune” (56) and were no longer mentioned at the table. The kind of music the youth listened to was increasingly in English, thus separating them from the world of their parents all at once. Boys and girls, meanwhile, struggled to interact casually, secretly afraid of one another.

Then, Ernaux writes, all of a sudden “[the girl in the photographs] is aware of her social standing” (61). She realized that her family...