SOURCE: A review of A Frozen Woman, in Kirkus Reviews, Vol. LXIII, No. 5, March 1, 1995, pp. 250-51.

In the review below, the critic summarizes the plot of A Frozen Woman.

French writer Ernaux (Simple Passion, 1993, etc.) continues her thinly disguised fictional autobiography [with A Frozen Woman], this time recalling with numbing intensity her passage to a womanhood trapped by convention and domesticity.

The unnamed narrator reworks some old ground as she describes growing up in a bourgeois but unconventional family. Her parents operated a small convenience store, a "landscape" where there were no "mute, submissive women." Her father peeled potatoes, her mother kept the books, and both encouraged their daughter to excel at school. "Dust doesn't exist for her [mother], or rather it's something natural, not a problem," and her mother teaches the narrator that "the world is made to be pounced on … enjoyed … that there is absolutely no...