If repetition is a common trait among prolific novelists, it is a vice that, as the historian Michael Wood has written, applies to Patrick Modiano “more than most.” The criticism one often hears of the French novelist—especially after his receipt of the Nobel Prize in October 2014—is that all his novels are the same. Over the course of a long career, beginning in 1968, Modiano has published more than 25 books. Short, stylized, staccato fictions, nearly all of them are variations on the theme of missing persons, either murdered in the German Occupation of France or adrift in its uncertain aftermath. Yet for one who has returned so frequently to the same subject, Modiano’s own story has remained somewhat elusive. What, after all, impels him to write the same book, time and time again?

Until the release of his memoir, now published in English, the details of Modiano’s life had remained selectively scattered throughout his work, present here and there but never compiled in a singular volume. An exception was his 1977 novel, Livret de la Famille, which contains a series of autobiographical sketches, albeit sketches that eschew a chronological narrative. Instead of recounting a story, his fiction tries to evoke what he calls “pre-history”: the world we came from but may not have known in any actual way, a dream-like past whose lack of reality creates a sense of distance in the present, sometimes even alienation.

“I’m a dog who pretends to have a pedigree,” Modiano writes.

Rootless and devoid of history, Modiano’s characters tend to reflect the way he sees himself. The opening line of his 1978 novel Rue des Boutiques Obscures is spoken by an amnesiac detective in search of his own past. “I am no one,” he confesses. “Nothing but a pale shape, silhouetted that evening against the café terrace, waiting for the rain to stop.” In a sense, this line is a distillation of Modiano’s entire oeuvre. If history is narrative—constructed, personal, inherited—then pre-history is the province of those without narrative. As Modiano put it: “Like everyone who has neither ground nor roots, I am obsessed by my prehistory.”

Who, then, is Patrick Modiano? His memoir Pedigree, originally published in France in 2005, is brief and sharp, a pointillist interpretation of personal history, a chronicle that resembles a mere list of names and places and dates that emphasizes, yet again, the question of pre-history. As its title suggests, the book is in part an homage to Georges Simenon’s Pedigree, the Belgian writer’s 1948 autobiographical novel “in which everything is true but nothing is accurate,” a natural inspiration for Modiano’s project. “I’m a dog who pretends to have a pedigree,” Modiano writes. “My mother and father didn’t belong to any particular milieu. So aimless were they, so unsettled, that I’m straining to find a few markers, a few beacons in this quicksand.”

Born in Paris in 1945, Modiano emerged from the wreckage of the Second World War, in a family formed by the vicissitudes of history. As he notes: “that’s the soil—or the dung from which I emerged.” His French-born father, Albert Modiano—with whom the young Patrick had a famously toxic relationship, recounted in Pedigree in considerable depth—was from a Sephardic Jewish family originally from Thessaloniki but with relations across the Mediterranean world, a number of whom were murdered in the Holocaust. By contrast, his Flemish mother, Louisa Colpeyn, a vain, would-be actress, finagled a way to be sent by the Germans to Paris, where she worked at Alfred Greven’s Continental Films, occupied France’s infamous Nazi-controlled film production company.