Shame + Frozen Woman + I'm still dark around me

Three prose works from the Nobel Prize winner

Three works of autofiction, inspired by different periods of the author's life, are linked by one strong figure—the writer's mother, a woman of working-class origins who did everything to ensure her daughter could attend university and become a grammar school teacher; through her daughter's success, the mother realised her own ambition to escape the despised working class and reach the highest echelons of the French intellectual scene.

Shame (1997) processes the author's memories of a horrifying situation in which her father tried to kill her mother, and seeks to get to the root of the feeling of shame that she, as a twelve-year-old girl attending a church school in 1952, constantly suffered from.

In the prose work The Frozen Woman (1981), the writer tries to find out why she submitted to social conventions and took on all the household chores, even though her mother had told her throughout her childhood not to get married so she could pursue a professional career.

“I Remain in Darkness” (1997) is a collection of diary entries in which the author describes visits to her mother, who is suffering from Alzheimer's disease and is in a care home. The text captures her mother's physical and, above all, mental decline.

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Ernaux relentlessly strips herself and her memories of all consoling embellishments and forces us to confront the agonising realities of human existence.
— Publishers Weekly

This excellently crafted and unsettling narrative powerfully captures the era of post-war reconstruction in France, while also helping us understand the motivations that drive writers to write.
— Booklist on the book Shame