Une femme

When her mother dies in a geriatric ward outside Paris after years of Alzheimer's disease, Annie Ernaux sets out to write her — to recover "the real woman, the one who existed independently from me." A Woman's Story (Une femme) traces that life from a poor childhood on the outskirts of a small Normandy town, through marriage and years spent running a grocery shop, to a restless retirement and a slow decline.

In barely a hundred pages, Ernaux moves between memoir, biography and social history, refusing easy sentiment. Writing her mother means writing about France, about women, about class and the distance that education and ambition opened between a daughter and the woman who raised her.

First published in French in 1987 and a bestseller in France, A Woman's Story is one of the defining works of the Nobel laureate's project of "auto-sociobiography" — spare, unflinching, and quietly devastating.