It’s rare for a writer to be self-conscious about the number of books lining the walls of their living room, particularly when they are one of France’s greatest living writers. But Annie Ernaux, whose sharp and often heartbreaking portraits of French daily life, class and society are enjoying a rush of interest in the English-speaking world, is aware that her bookshelves mark how far she’s come from a working-class childhood in rural Normandy. “You’ve read all this?” gasped one relative on a visit to her book-filled house on the outskirts of a 1970s commuter town north of Paris.

“It’s terrible to play yourself down,” says the 78-year-old Ernaux. But it was that “experience of limitation”, that unwritten rule “not to venture above your station in life”, that defined the tough world of factories and farm-workers she grew up in, she says. Ernaux’s mother, who features in much of her writing, refused to accept the supposed inferiority she was born to – she progressed from gruelling and greasy work in a margarine factory to running a small cafe-grocery and “was an exception in her social class”. Ernaux was pushed on by her mother, who had left school aged 12 but was a voracious reader and believed books and learning were the ticket to a different future. “My mother always washed her hands before opening a book,” she recalls.

In France, Ernaux, who for many years taught literature at secondary school, is seen as perhaps the greatest chronicler of French society in the last 50 years – a kind of guardian of collective memory. She is one of the few women on France’s male-dominated high school literature syllabuses. In a deceptively succinct, factual style, she lays bare troubling secrets and bodily experiences often hidden away: illegal abortion, dementia, cancer, sex.

What’s different about Ernaux is that her books for the past 30 years have been meticulously pieced together from observation and memory of real events; everything has to be accurate and factual, down to the very precise words of an era, the words of a song, the exact colour of a jumper, all set within gripping narratives. This has proved problematic – should her writing be categorised as fiction or non-fiction? – and some English-speaking critics and publishers are now tempted to place it as memoir. Ernaux is adamant: she writes novels, fiction. The act of submerging yourself in an era and telling a story there, “to recreate and rebuild from words and feelings” is clearly a literary act, she believes.

“It’s the work of a novelist to tell the truth. Sometimes I don’t know what truth I’m looking for, but it’s always a truth that I’m seeking,” she says.

The English-speaking world is waking up to her books in part because of the recent success of her defining work The Years, translated by Alison L Strayer, which was shortlisted for the Man Booker international prize this year and also took a major translation prize. It tells the story of France from 1941 to the present day through the thread of a woman’s life story. It draws on Ernaux’s youth in Yvetot in Normandy, conversations between the soldiers of the first and second world wars that she overheard as a child in her mother’s cafe, moving on to the protests of May 1968 and social progress, such as the arrival of the pill, which many doctors at first didn’t mention or want to prescribe. It is meticulous in its references to the slogans, the expressions, the consumerism and the meals of each era. “For me, the memory of times past is linked to meals and the conversations around them. So I took that as a central thread. It’s not intellect that’s at work in that moment, it’s something else, something deep from childhood. After all, our childhood is the matrix for everything.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest French strikers demonstrating in Paris in 1968. Photograph: Jacques Marie/AFP/Getty Images

But her growing following in the US and the UK also comes from her gripping and devastating novel Happening, translated by Tanya Leslie, which was published in the UK in February, telling in a plain, detached style the harrowing story of her illegal abortion as a student in Rouen in 1963. The book details the desperate search for a backstreet abortionist as the days and weeks of her unwanted pregnancy tick past, when no one will share any information on where to go. With the new limitations on abortion in the US, it is seen in France and abroad as compulsory reading. “Two years ago, a reading was staged at the Comédie Française [France’s national theatre], it was always full and there was always someone who fainted, often men,” she says.

Happening is typical of Ernaux’s style of storytelling; she painstakingly recreates the real events down to the abortionist boiling her instruments on the kitchen stove, the failed attempts, and the eventual, agonising shock expulsion of a fetus in a university toilet and the medical trouble that follows. As a rule, Ernaux only includes the details she recalls, nothing is added.

“Did I take paper to wipe myself?” she wonders now of the terrible scene in the toilet. “I don’t know. It was a communal toilet for everyone, so did I clear it up? I don’t know at all. I have a blank on that.” You didn’t want to fill the blank? “No I don’t fill a blank.” But she recalls the biscuit packaging she put the remains into. She shudders.

It was about a feeling of “abandonment”, she says. “There were thousands who had been through secret abortions, I wanted to recreate the truth of it exactly as it was in the moment, ridding myself of any knowledge of the fight for women’s rights that would follow. Because in 1963, 1964 when it happened to me, it was unthinkable to imagine abortion would one day be authorised, doctors wouldn’t even say the word.”

All her writing comes from the “urgency to save something”, she says, to preserve memories lest they be forgotten and disappear. With Happening, she wanted “to save it so it never happened again”.

Her latest book to be translated into English, by Leslie again, is I Remain in Darkness, the diary she kept of her mother’s Alzheimer’s. Her account of living through her descent and hospitalisation is warm and at times funny – “grotesque maybe”, she corrects. In one early scene, as family members help her mother into her bedroom, the elderly lady lifts her leg very high to purposely step over the carpeted threshold as if dramatically getting into a pool, and laughs at the absurdity along with the others. She clings to her toiletry bag as a way to not let things slip away. The book is also about the incongruous outbursts. “It was as if all the hurt of her life was resurfacing. In hospital she’d suddenly interject: ‘I’m working so hard’, or ‘they never give me anything to eat’. Of visitors to the other women who shared her room, she would say: ‘Don’t worry about them, they’re customers and half don’t pay’.

When you’re locked in the present, a diary is a type of exit we give ourselves – a temporary escape

“So all my childhood came flooding back, how she would help people at her shop by giving them credit until their benefits came in. I still can’t think about it without emotion.”

There were moments when her mother seemed far away and others when she seemed all-knowing. Ernaux had separated from her husband. “At the time, I was having what you would call a torrid relationship,” Ernaux says, which her mother didn’t know about. “There was this kind of old deep-seated shame that resurfaced in me, as my mother was someone who had always wanted to ban all sexuality. And in one really strange moment, after having spent a night with that man, I went to see her and she suddenly said: “Aren’t you ashamed?”

Ernaux wrote the diary to cope. “When you’re locked in the present, a diary is a type of exit we give ourselves – an escape which is obviously temporary, but helped the situation I was going through.”

She put the diary aside for years without opening it. “I would never have wanted to publish it, then one day I was about to go on a trip to a university in the US and, I don’t know why, I thought I must type up the handwritten notes. And I saw that it wasn’t in any way obscene, which I’d feared.”

It was when she had Alzheimer’s that Ernaux’s mother finally told her that she had had two children. It had been the great family secret – Ernaux had a sister who died of diphtheria at six years old. “They had only wanted one child, but after her death, they decided to have another,” says Ernaux. She discovered the fact aged 10, but no one had ever felt able to talk about it. “I’m a replacement child, I would not have been born if my sister had lived. That’s quite a discovery – it wasn’t clear in my head, and through writing, suddenly it became clear.”

One of Ernaux’s recent big-selling books in France, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman, will be published in English early next year – the story of an 18-year-old’s troubling first sexual experiences in 1958 and the shaming of young girls by their peer group. Ernaux, a feminist who once wondered whether she would die “without seeing the women’s revolution”, says she has lived through massive change for women in France and, as a 45-year-old in the 1980s, lived in a way “almost impossible to countenance in the 1950s”. She feels women’s battle for equal rights has progressed in the last few years, but is far from over. A decade ago, she had feared what she felt was “a return to a traditional vision, feminism was a dirty word, and then #MeToo came. People said it was as if it came out of nowhere but that’s not true. There was a whole generation of twentysomething women whose view of masculine privilege had changed.”

Politics is “inseparable from writing”, she feels. She had sympathy for the many gilets jaunes anti-government protesters in France last autumn. She has been vocal about what she sees as France’s obsession with Muslim women who choose to cover their heads.

For years, she felt that if she succeeded at writing, she would be able to somehow “avenge” her people, her social standing – “that feeling of belonging to an inferior class”. She says: “I was the only one in my mother’s family who studied, and on my father’s side there was one cousin who studied history. So writing to me was a way I could bring something. But I was wrong. I thought that if I wrote, I would avenge my whole people, but no, I would simply have succeeded as an individual. Nothing more, nothing less.”

• I Remain in Darkness will be published in the UK in September and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman next February, both by Fitzcarraldo Editions.