SOURCE: Miller, Nancy K. “Memory Stains: Annie Ernaux's Shame.” a/b: Auto/Biography Studies 14, no. 1 (summer 1999): 38-50.

In the following essay, Miller maintains that the feelings of shame and self-pity expressed in Shame transcend class boundaries and function as a unifying thematic concern for Ernaux's readers.

The force which opposes scopophilia, but which may be overridden by it … is shame.

—Sigmund Freud, Three Essays on Sexuality

I've always wanted to write books that I could not speak about afterwards, and that made the gaze of others unbearable.

—Annie Ernaux, Shame

“My father tried to kill my mother one Sunday in June, in the early afternoon.” This starkly simple sentence begins the slim volume of reminiscence that unfolds from that act manqué. The sentence and the scene it introduces come as a shock to the readers of Ernaux's previous work.¹ Why, so many years after the published narratives devoted...