A Woman's Story

In a geriatric ward of a hospital in the Paris suburbs, an elderly woman with Alzheimer’s disease is dying. Her daughter, the writer Annie Ernaux, trying to cope with the loss, begins a new book in which the story of one human fate unfolds—a woman born into a poor Norman family before World War I, who throughout her life strove to overcome the boundaries of her class. “I think I’m writing about my mother because it’s my turn to give her life,” Ernaux explains the beginning of her work, and in the text she lives through scene after scene of her mother’s life until its very fading away, pausing over separate episodes of their difficult relationship with the emotional distance of a biographer—yet without consolation for the daughter left alone with an irreplaceable lack.