SOURCE: A review of A Woman's Story, in The Bloomsbury Review, Vol. 11, No. 5, July-August, 1991, p. 6.

In the following, Shoaf offers praise for A Woman's Story, classifying the volume as a "fictional memoir."

Though little known in the U.S., the fiction of Annie Ernaux frequently makes the bestseller list in her native France. A Woman's Story, a biographical novel about Ernaux's mother, and its companion work, La Place, a portrait of her father, are both taught to French schoolchildren as contemporary classics. The former, first published in the U.S. this past Mother's Day, appropriately enough, begins with Ernaux's account of her visit to the convalescent home—where Mme. Ernaux had resided for several years—immediately after being notified of her mother's death. In terse, elegant prose, she describes the minutiae surrounding the event—the facility's custom of having "the body of the deceased remain in its room...