Hanba, Zamrzlá žena, Mám kolem sebe pořád tmu – Ernauxová Annie (2025)

Three stories by a Nobel Prize winner

Three autofictional stories, inspired by different periods of the author's life, are united by one strong figure — the writer's mother, a woman of working-class origin who did everything she could to ensure her daughter could attend university and become a high school professor; through her daughter's success, the mother realized her effort to escape the despised working class and reach the highest echelons of the French intellectual scene.

Shame (1997) deals with the author's memories of a terrifying situation in which her father attempted to kill her mother, and seeks to uncover the root of the feeling of shame that she constantly suffered from as a twelve-year-old girl during her studies at a church school in 1952.

In the story The Frozen Woman (1981), the writer tries to trace why she succumbed to social conventions and took on all household responsibilities, even though her mother had led her throughout her childhood to believe that she would not marry in order to pursue a professional career.

I Still Have Darkness Around Me (1997) consists of diary entries in which the author describes visits to her mother, who is placed in a care facility with Alzheimer's disease. The text captures the physical and especially mental decline of her mother.