In light of her modest social background, the Nobel prize awarded to Annie Ernaux sounds like a social miracle. She was born in 1940, in Yvetot, a little town in the Northern French province of Normandie, to former workers who held a small café-grocery. Her trajectory is one of upward mobility through education in a period of strong belief in meritocracy. Her mother sent her to a private Catholic school and encouraged her to invest in her studies. A good pupil, after high school Ernaux studied Literature and Sociology at the University of Rouen. She became a secondary school teacher in French literature and married a man from a higher social milieu.