This chapter examines two very different examples of the diary form in Ernaux's writing; ‘Je ne suis pas sortie de ma nuit’ and Journal du dehors/La Vie extérieure. While the first work is a highly personal account of the physical and psychological degeneration of the narrator's mother through Alzheimer's disease, the latter two comprise a more objective series of literary snapshots, capturing everyday life in a Ville Nouvelle in the Paris suburbs. The adoption of the diary form in ‘Je ne suis pas sortie de ma nuit’ is presented as more than mere literary convention: the narrator claims to have had no intention of publishing the diary when she wrote it. That the projected readership of the diary was apparently limited to its author may account for the uncharacteristically subjective nature of Ernaux's writing in it. The narrator's originally private conception of the act of writing in ‘Je ne suis pas sortie de ma nuit’ may also be discernible in her portrayal of that act as a visceral, rather than intellectual, exercise: the diary is presented as a channel through which she can voice her thoughts and feelings ‘uncensored’. The narrator's claim to have published the diary unaltered is supported by the appearance of repetitions, chronological errors – ‘Je dois me tromper de date’ (JSN, p. 57) – as well as the names of individuals. ‘Je ne suis pas sortie de ma nuit’ constitutes the most explicitly auto/biographical text in Ernaux's corpus, in that, for the first time, we are provided with the real names of Ernaux's sons and of her ex-husband, names which first appeared in the dedication to Ce qu'ils disent ou rien and La Femme gelée respectively. It is also here that the nominal identity of the narrator's mother appears in full, unlike its more elusive counterpart ‘Madame D.’, whom we encounter in Une femme.

Where ‘Je ne suis pas sortie de ma nuit’ was conceived as a diary for the narrator's personal expression and centres on the mother/daughter relationship within the confines of a hospital, both the temporal and focal scope of Journal du dehors and La Vie extérieure is significantly broader.