A Woman's Story

Product Information

Depicting conflict in gender bias, experiences of exploitation, violence, and powerlessness, sometimes resulting in pain and despair in their turbulent world.

We can see how her mother behaved in a peculiar manner during certain situations due to these alienations. On the other, however, Ernaux has other books that deserve attention for venturing beyond her typical powerful explorations of social class in France, such as La honte (discussing the delicate issue of domestic violence), L’événement (touching on the sensitive experience of the author with abortion) and Une Femme (about her mother’s ordinary life until she developed Alzheimer’s). She started losing things—"I can't put my hands on it"—and was astonished to find them in places where she claimed she had never put them. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. In January 2017, our Centre Director, Caroline Burrell made a powerful speech about A Woman’s Story and how survivors telling their stories can have a huge effect on healing, at the Scottish Government’s Violence Against Women (VAW) and Girls Fund ‘Changing Lives’ conference.

On one hand, La place is a brief, austere but still rich account of the life of a man whose life would not be seen as worthy of literary writing. It is about why her mother behaved in a peculiar manner, as her daughter (the author) was more successful than her.

I do understand, life isn’t alaways cheeful and I also have to choose the moment I cannot always read about such topics. But these stories also tell of these women’s celebration of life itself that empowers them and gives them the will to sustain. Ernaux finds the truth of her mothers life, and it turns out to be not one thing, but the whole story.Every now and then, I seem to be back in the days when she was still living at home, before she left for the hospital. Era diventato difficile avere rapporti con lei: non riconosceva più la figlia, la chiamava “signora”. The English edition was a New York Times Notable Book and a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. All told, she has worked in the fields of law and psychology for over thirty years, and her experiences in these fields inform her writing. She never had time to do the cooking and look after the house ‘properly’, sewing on a button seconds, before I left for school, or ironing her blouse on a corner of the kitchen table before slipping it on .

We will continue to work with the police, justice system and Scottish Government to improve access to justice for survivors. Proud and self-sufficient, the mother lives alone, but then she has an accident, develops Alzheimer's, and must move to a hospital. I would also like to capture the real woman, the woman who existed independently from me, born on the outskirts of a small Normandy town, and who died in the geriatric ward of a hospital in the suburbs of Paris. A Woman's Story is Annie Ernaux's "deeply affecting account of mothers and daughters, youth and age, and dreams and reality” (Kirkus Reviews).It is the author’s and our sincere hope that A Woman’s Story will be actively utilised by police, health, justice and other services to help inform policy, practice and training in relation to responding to individuals who have been affected by sexual violence.

People left the books they didn’t want anymore on that shelf and you could always find an interesting choice. I always feel badly when children are embarassed by their parents because of their job or lack of education and meanwhile the parent is working hard to provide more for their child than they had growing up. It was only the day before yesterday that I overcame the fear of writing My Mother died on a blank sheet of paper, not as the first line of a letter but as the opening of a book. In her opinion, self-improvement was first and foremost a question of learning and nothing was more precious than knowledge.

I am happy that I have at last read a book by a Nobel prize winner, which I can recommend to everyone as it is written in a simple language that everyone can understand and connect with the feelings shared by the author. Our Spanish-language imprint represents a major ongoing effort to introduce important English-language texts to new readers. This idea applies to Une Femme as well: the little girl in a Normandy town, the teenager working at a factory, the young woman sheltering her infant child from bombings during World War II, the middle-aged woman gossiping around the village as if she served men coffee — it is difficult to believe these are all the same person. Ernaux's mother (she is never named), who was born in a small town in Normandy where she saw the fruition of the ``only ambition which lay within her reach: running a grocery business,'' finally succumbs to Alzheimer's disease.