SOURCE: "Divided by Language," in Belles Lettres: A Review of Books by Women, Vol. VI, No. 4, Summer, 1991, pp. 18-19.

In the following review of Cleaned Out and A Woman's Story, Neely notes Ernaux's focus on language, literacy, alienation, and class.

Lying in her dorm room after a backstreet abortion, alone and terrified of hemorrhaging to death, twenty-year-old Denise Lesur recalls the circumstances that brought her to this point of absolute vulnerability. Her intention is to "figure it out, get to the bottom of it all between contractions." What Denise attempts to understand is the divide between herself and her working-class parents, a rift that began when Denise was enrolled in a private school and that widened each year as she acquired the language, desires, and manners of the dominant culture.

Set in postwar France, Cleaned Out (originally published in 1974 as Les Armoires vides …) is the first semiautobiographical novel...