Getting Lost is Ernaux’s raw journal from the period of her affair with a married diplomat in the late 1980s — the material that would later be shaped into Simple Passion. 

The entries record obsession in real time: waiting, humiliation, physical desire, the narrowing of consciousness around another person.

Ernaux turns a private fixation into a study of time, dependency, and gendered power. It sits within her broader project of “impersonal autobiography,” where the self is treated as document rather than spectacle.