SOURCE: "'When Mother Became History,'" in The New York Times Book Review, May 19, 1991, p. 13.

In the review below, Danto discusses thematic aspects of A Woman's Story, lauding the volume's originality and tender portrait of Ernaux's mother.

In her 1964 novella, A Very Easy Death, Simone de Beauvoir wrought from the charged theme of a dying mother a portrait of a daughter's own emotional trial. Moreover, because the story concerned the author's mother, readers had the option of considering it as literature or life.

The trend encouraged by de Beauvoir garnered an enthusiastic response in France, which may explain the success of more recent practitioners of this genre, notably Annie Ernaux, a professor of literature whose last two novels, La Place and Une Femme, describing the deaths of her father and mother, respectively, became best sellers. Like de Beauvoir, with whom she has been compared, Ms. Ernaux all but...