International audience Annie Ernaux's writing, here the one from the Years, formally accomplishes the implication of the subject within a social paradigm. The narrative matter is made of a collective space-time, a shared memory-based core, identities more social than personal. The social representations are moved towards an equivalence class by the inclusion of the singular into the general, by a neutralization and, finally, by a continuity, when individuals seem interchangeable. The social link is formed in making a speech based on experience: in the lists, which articulate the intimate and the community, in a shared enunciation of things and, especially, in the act of building a story.