SOURCE: A review of A Woman's Story, in The Review of Contemporary Fiction, Vol. XI, No. 3, Fall, 1991, pp. 270-71.

In the review below, Laurence praises the narrative structure and stylistic features of A Woman's Story.

"Mother died" are two words that reverberate in French literature ever since Camus's L'Etranger. In Annie Ernaux's A Woman's Story, the same spare words evoke an intimacy with the reader never achieved in Camus's description of Mersault's alienated relationship. "We think back through our mothers if we are women," observes Virginia Woolf, and Annie Ernaux also thinks back: "It was only when my mother—born in an oppressed world from which she wanted to escape—became history that I started to feel less alone and out of place in a world ruled by words and ideas, the world where she had wanted me to live." And so the mother's life of giving passes...