A Woman's Story

Product Information

www.gutenberg.org/license. Section 1. General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works Ernaux wrote this lightly fictionalized memoir of her mother after she dies in the geriatric ward from Alzheimer's disease. She begins with her personal memories and fills in blanks for a mother born in 1906. The account is rarely sentimental (until the end) and often aloof as she seeks to capture the complex bond and contrast between her working-class mother (typical for her generation) and her own university education and feminist ideas. 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”. She got confused by the different rooms in the house and would ask me angrily how to get to her own bedroom. 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. She demanded that I give her some sewing or ironing or even some vegetables to peel, but as soon as she started on something, she lost patience and gave up. She seemed to live in a state of perpetual restlessness. Although she longed for new occupations—watching television, having lunch, going out in the garden—they never gave her the slightest satisfaction.

The significance of what Lady Macbeth says here lies in the fact that her admonishment becomes tragically ironic later in the play. In this scene, she is angry at her husband showing fear for, what she believes, is a figment of his imagination. She scolds him for being afraid of nothing. Macbeth's actions, though, are an expression of his guilt for having murdered his closest friend, Banquo. He imagines seeing the bloodstained ghost of his erstwhile friend occupying his seat at the banquet table and reacts in a most uncharacteristic manner by showing fear and being horrified. She was suffering from Alzheimer's Disease, the name given by the doctors to a form of senile dementia. Over the past few days, I have found it more and more difficult to write, possibly because I would like never to reach this point. And yet I know I shall have no peace of mind until I find the words that will reunite the demented woman she had become with the strong, radiant woman she once was. Again we talked to each other in a very particular tone, a mixture of annoyance and eternal reproach that always wrongly gave the impression that we were arguing, a tone between mother and daughter that I would recognize in any language." Festeggio il Premio Nobel leggendo gli ultimi due titoli che mi mancavano, felice perché so che ne sta per arrivare un altro.Nothing less than a minimalist revelation, a piece of writing so spare and sharp that it cuts straight to the heart with the accuracy of a surgeon’s scalpel.” –Los Angeles Reader La scrittura della Ernaux è talmente piana e senza fronzoli da apparire quasi sciatta, quasi non fossero che appunti frettolosi in un diario. Eppure la sua efficacia e la sua precisione sono innegabili. Questo breve scritto autobiografico riesce ad avere un respiro universale pur parlando di qualcosa che più personale e intimo non può essere. E colpisce dritto al cuore. Tanto di cappello.

This is more memoir than fiction, and begins with the death of the author's mother. Then, she proceeds to describe her mother's life, from beginning to end. In Act V, scene l, however, it is Lady Macbeth who succumbs to the visions that she sees. She is overwhelmed by guilt and remorse and imagines seeing blood on her hands. She consistently rubs them, trying to remove what she imagines, are bloodstains left on her hands from Duncan's murder. It is said that contradiction is unthinkable; but the fact is that in the pain of a living being it is even an actual existence”--Hegel (Ernaux opens the book with this quotation) It is a decidedly female perspective from which Annie Ernaux tells the story. And like probably many girls, she thought she would have to be like her own mother when she grew up. This arc encompasses her own growing up and growing old. In the end, she takes on mothering duties for her mother in need of care, caring for the old woman who has become forgetful and dorky, feeding her chocolate like a little child. These are heartbreaking scenes that Ernaux puts to paper with her usual few strokes. Scenes in which she cries because her mother has become so different from her childhood. As countless women before her, Annie Ernaux had to helplessly watch on as her mother grew old, and eventually had to bit her farewell.And it isn’t so easy to look away from the mirrors that society creates for us. When Ernaux leaves the camp, she develops bulimia, and her period stops. “I could not imagine there was a name for my behavior. . . . I thought of it as a moral failing. I don’t believe I linked it to H.” E poi la distanza che questo passaggio crea, gli imbarazzi e i sensi di colpa, la lontananza seguita negli ultimi anni da una nuova vicinanza necessaria ma non del tutto desiderata, il declino della vecchiaia reso ancora più penoso dal declino mentale.