SOURCE: Miller, Nancy K. “Ethnographers of the Self.” Women's Review of Books 16, nos. 10-11 (July 1999): 35-6.

In the following review, Miller compares Shame with Anne Roiphe's 1185 Park Avenue, asserting that the works are connected by “scenes of emotional soil that stain memory, leaving a residue of unresolved emotion—and the scars of witness.”

Could two memoirs be more different? Why did both have the power to move me? One by a French woman writer who grew up in a space above her parents' café-grocery so cramped that she shared a bedroom and a chamber pot with her mother and father at night; the other by an American woman writer who spent her childhood in a huge Park Avenue apartment where everyone had separate rooms, not to mention baths.

Annie Ernaux and Anne Roiphe are well-established authors and cultural critics who began their careers as autobiographical novelists and...