I Remain in Darkness

I Remain in Darkness by Annie Ernaux is a short, devastating document — a diary kept during her mother’s decline into Alzheimer’s disease and eventual death, which Ernaux kept not as a private record but as a literary act: a commitment to not looking away from what was happening. The entries are brief and precise, recording physical and emotional details that are simultaneously clinical and unbearably personal. Ernaux’s characteristic willingness to examine her own feelings without sentimentality or self-protection gives the book an honesty that is rare in writing about illness and grief. Published by Fitzcarraldo Editions in a slim but concentrated form, I Remain in Darkness is essential Ernaux — one of the most honest accounts of watching a parent dissolve ever written.