SOURCE: "Leaving Father Behind," in The New York Times Book Review, May 10, 1992, pp. 5-6.

Seymour is an English novelist, biographer, editor, and journalist. In the following, she favorably reviews A Man's Place, lauding it as an "exorcism of remembrance" devoid of artifice.

A rewarding experiment for a writer is to take powerfully felt events and try to describe them in way that mixes genres. The results can be seen at their best in the autobiographical novels of Annie Ernaux, a teacher who grew up in postwar Normandy and now lives near Paris.

In Une Femme, which was published in the United States last year as A Woman's Story, Ms. Ernaux wrote of her mother in an almost painfully spare fashion that turned personal loss into extraordinarily evocative literature. But if the book's success had much to do with a triumph of style over sentiment, it owed as much...