SOURCE: A review of A Man's Place, in The Review of Contemporary Fiction, Vol. XII, No. 2, Summer, 1992, pp. 228-29.

In the following laudatory review, Laurence discusses stylistic aspects of A Man's Place.

Reading Annie Ernaux's spare biography/autobiography A Man's Place, one gets the feeling as in her earlier work, A Woman's Story (1991), that writing is a "luxury." Torn between two identities, Ernaux takes possession of the harsh working-class life and language of her parents and the distance that comes between her and her father as the "legacy" of an educated woman writer in a bourgeois world. "Although," she says, "it had something to do with class, it was different, indefinable. Like fractured love." She opens with the fracture of two moments in her life: "that windy April in Lyon when I stood waiting at the Vroix-Rousse bus stop" after passing the CAPES examination to take her place...