"Street Diary" is a collection of notes Annie Ernaux made between 1985 and 1992 about what she saw and overheard on trains, shopping malls, the metro, city boulevards, train stations, and squares. A snapshot of collective French life, a class- and culturally stratified society, these short scenes featuring random passersby and fellow travelers, bourgeois and homeless people, shop assistants and shoppers were conceived as "a photographic record of reality," but, as Ernaux admits, they revealed more about herself than the introspective practice of keeping a personal diary.