The volume I Remain in Darkness is Annie Ernaux's collection of unedited journal entries that she wrote over the last two and a half years of her mother's life. The entries depict Ernaux's highly personal reaction to her mother's decline to Alzheimer's disease. As Ernaux experiences an almost overwhelming onslaught of conflicting emotions, she reflects on her past and, most particularly, her relationship with her mother, Blanche.
Although in previously published works Ernaux has explored ties to her family that were fraught with difficulty, I Remain in Darkness provides an intensely intimate, immediate portrayal of the bonds between a grown daughter and her dying mother.
Published in France in 1997 and translated into English three years later, I Remain in Darkness was for over a decade Ernaux's private chronicle and almost remained so. Ernaux writes in her preface that she initially believed she would not publish her journals, "Maybe because I wanted to offer only one image, one side of the truth portraying my mother and my relationship with her." She had already written about this relationship in A Woman's Story, her autobiographical novel about a mother and daughter. However, as several years passed, Ernaux began to question her own wisdom; "The consistency and coherence achieved in any written work ... must be questioned whenever possible." Read in conjunction with A Woman's Story, I Remain in Darkness thus provides a multifaceted portrait of the life of a rural, working-class French woman.
Read in isolation from other Ernaux works, I Remain in Darkness still tells a poignant story of a powerful love.
This complete Introduction contains 261 words. This
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