SOURCE: Meyer, E. Nicole. Review of La honte and “Je ne suis pas sortie de ma nuit,” by Annie Ernaux. World Literature Today 73, no. 1 (winter 1999): 107.

In the following review, Meyer finds La honte and “Je ne suis pas sortie de ma nuit” to be complementary books that provide telling insights into Ernaux's past.

Annie Ernaux's two most recent books appeared almost simultaneously in late 1997. They serve as bookends to each other—similar in their need to disclose a certain truth about an essential event or time in Ernaux's life yet dissimilar in their approach and success.

Presented more as an ethnological study, La honte recounts a long-passed moment which distances the young narrator from her parents (and from the reader). The work serves to disclose her realization, at the age of twelve, of social exclusion and of the existence of two worlds which are inherently separate. The event...