Annie Ernaux’s genre bending and briefly existent novel “A Woman’s Story” is exactly as the title says: A woman’s story. The woman in question is Ernaux’s mother, who had recently passed at the time of the books conception.
Ernaux utilizes writing’s testifying aspect of personal storytelling, and the deeply healing yet repeatedly scorching effect of a forced exploration of grief and the painful yet cathartic reiteration of the essence of the one lost.
The writing in this book has a charged straight forwardness, quiet and biographical, but occasionally flourished with emotionally impactful and deeply final sentences and sentiments. The writing is in no way flowery or embellished, Ernaux’s grief for her relationship with her mother not manifesting itself in that way; Annie wants to communicate her mother in a way that is unbiased but authentic, an impossible undertaking with a relationship this complex and incomparable.
“As I write, I see her sometimes as a “good”, sometimes as a “bad” mother. To get away from these contrasting views, which come from my earliest childhood, I try to describe and explain her life as if I were writing about someone else’s mother and a daughter who wasn’t me.”
At a point in the book, Ernaux talks of a fleeting comparison she made as a daughter, which did not sit right with me. “Fleetingly, I confuse the woman who influenced me most with an African mother pinning her daughter’s arms behind her back while the village midwife slices off the girl’s clitoris.” In these circumstances she has posited of her upbringing with her mother, and considering she is a white woman, I think the ways in which Ernaux explains the emotionally charged relationship with her mother, whether negatively or positively, in no way provide a justifiable comparison to young African women’s forced genital mutilation, and I think this line should definitely have been edited out, as it feels like an unnecessary sensationalization of her far different type of matriarchal influence to an actual inhumane and tragically perpetuated sexually repressing practice forced upon young girls commonly in certain countries, ones very much less commonly white and privileged than France.
Aside from this comment I thought came across as naive and insensitive, Ernaux chronicles her mother’s life and death in her own juxtapositional dejected yet tender fashion, her way of writing this both cathartic and deeply emotional for her, but also often jarring and unsettling for the reader. There is no easy or truly encompassing way to recapture a mother’s life and death, but there is an especially unique insight and understanding of a mother specific only to a daughter, and in this book, Ernaux definitely fulfills this uneasily undertaken but almost certain role of a secretarial daughter.
portraitofayoungwoman 