An Insidious Entrapment

A Woman’s Story and A Frozen Woman by Annie Ernaux

In an opening smartly reminiscent of the first lines of Camus’ novel The Stranger, the French writer Annie Ernaux begins A Woman’s Story (Une femme), her spare, deeply affecting memoir-novel of her relationship with her late mother, with the simple declaration:

My mother died on Monday 7 April in the old people’s home attached to the hospital at Pontoise, where I had installed her two years previously. The nurse said over the phone: ‘Your mother passed away this morning, after breakfast.’ It was around ten o’clock.

Yet the story she tells in this terse, laconic style, a style she calls écriture plate, is anything but detached, anything but absurd, as she struggles earnestly to see and make sense of her proud, self-sufficient mother, a woman for whom, all her life, she felt a profound ambivalence, a troubling mixture of love, hate, guilt, frustration, and pride. In short it is the story of daughters and mothers everywhere—powerfully, honestly told. 

Having read A Woman’s Story in a single sitting (it is just 92 pages long), I began Ernaux’s novel A Frozen Woman (Femme gelée) that same night and was even more impressed with the story, even more enamored with her style.

In brief, the novel charts Ernaux’s awakening as a teenage girl to the bourgeois realities in store for her as a young woman. Hemmed in at an early age by society’s expectations for her, the unnamed narrator suddenly finds herself a settled, intellectually stifled thirty-year-old woman with a husband and two children, trapped—like a fly in web—in the very life she’d struggled so hard to avoid. It is a poignant, familiar, finally harrowing tale, a twisted Bildungsroman in which, by the end, she can only gape in amazement at the woman she’s become:

"Just on the verge, just. Soon I’ll have one of those lined, pathetic faces that horrify me at the beauty parlor when I see them titled back over the shampooing sink, eyes closed. In how many years? On the verge of sagging cheeks and wrinkles that can no longer be disguised.

 

                                                          Already me, that face."

Peter Adam Nash