After the events of that summer, it took Ernaux another decade and a half to find her voice. Her early influences — from Simone de Beauvoir to the social upheaval of May 1968 — are captured in vivid snapshots in “The Years,” which weaves together nearly 70 years of autobiography and history.

Her first novel, written at college, was rejected by publishers as “too ambitious,” she said. When she took up writing again, in the early 1970s, she was a French teacher and a married mother of two, newly acquainted with the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu and his theory of social reproduction.

Bourdieu’s emphasis on the ways the education system excludes working-class children brought Ernaux to a realization: Suddenly, the shame she felt as a scholarship student, with a background so unlike her bourgeois peers, made sense.

She wrote “Cleaned Out” without telling anyone. “My husband had made fun of me after my first manuscript. I pretended to work on a Ph.D. thesis to have time alone,” she said. When the book was picked up by a prestigious publishing house, Gallimard, her husband Philippe was aggrieved, Ernaux said: “He told me: If you’re capable of writing a book in secret, then you’re capable of cheating on me.” By her third book, “A Frozen Woman,” which explored the writer’s ambivalent feelings about being a wife and mother, divorce loomed.

Ernaux said that choosing not to remarry had given her freedom. “I lived with men for periods of time, but very quickly, I would get tired of it. I’m picturing being on lockdown with someone right now — what a nightmare,” she said, laughing.

In the early 1990s, she startled many in France with “A Simple Passion,” an account of her affair with a married foreign diplomat, which explores desire in disarming, sensual detail, without moralizing. By that point, Ernaux had done away with any pretense of fiction, and the book, which sold 200,000 copies in two months, attracted virulent criticism from social conservatives.