Several of Annie Ernaux’s works contain reflections on her creative process, but it is in L’écriture comme un couteau (2003) and Le vrai lieu (2014) in particular that she elaborates in detail on the link between places, life, and writing. These two volumes of interviews shed light on the origins of her desire to write, the motivations and the circumstances which pushed her to reveal a number of unspeakable personal experiences, as well as the creative strategies which enabled her to make writing her “true place”. After her first novels, and the subsequent rejection of fiction and of novelistic conventions, it becomes imperative for Ernaux to find the right words, alone able to express the truth of her place of origin. Once past the “writing as a knife” stage, she focuses primarily on individual and collective memory in order to better capture the intersection between stories and History.