Alone in her college dorm room, Denise attempts to understand how her suffocating middle-class upbringing has brought her to such an awful present. Ernaux, one of France's most important contemporary writers, daringly breaks with formal French literary tradition in this moving novel about abortion, growing up, and coming to terms with one's childhood. For the reader in English, Sanders is also successful at making many specific cultural references come alive. The author also wages war against an idea so widely held that it occurs to no one to expose it. By giving an adolescent access to a different social milieu through some superficial school studies, he or she is ripped from her class.
Culture can turn into an instrument of hatred and contempt. . . .
I've been cut in two,' cries Denise Lesur. On the one hand there are the empty closets of culture, on the other, the harsher truth that clings to the body. A lively, dense, vehement interior monologue that reels out the poetic and sordid images of a childhood and adolescence which end in an experience of uprooting. This novel depicts a sentimental education, or rather a 'miseducation.' . . . On this question Annie Ernaux joins many writers of humble origins, from Rousseau to Camus. . . .