Getting Lost

Getting Lost by Annie Ernaux is the unexpurgated version of the diary she kept during the affair documented in Simple Passion — the full, raw record of her obsession with a married Soviet diplomat in the late 1980s, which she kept back from publication for decades because of its uncompromising directness. Where Simple Passion is a literary meditation shaped retrospectively, Getting Lost is the unmediated experience: the waiting, the humiliation, the desire, the political context of a Cold War affair, and the moments of ecstasy and degradation that Ernaux records with unflinching honesty. Published by Fitzcarraldo Editions, this is essential for readers who have followed Ernaux’s autobiographical project and want to experience the raw material that her literary art transforms.