A Woman’s Story

A Woman’s Story by Annie Ernaux is the Nobel laureate’s tribute to her mother — an attempt to capture the life of a woman who grew up in rural Normandy poverty and clawed her way to the lower middle class through determination and sacrifice, only to be erased by Alzheimer’s in old age. Ernaux writes about her mother with a mixture of love, frustration, guilt, and the specific pain of watching a strong woman dissolve into someone she no longer recognises. The book is also a meditation on the impossibility of truly knowing another person — especially a parent — and on the ways that class shapes not just material life but the self. Published by Fitzcarraldo Editions, A Woman’s Story is one of Ernaux’s most emotionally direct and humane works.