Critics often preface their remarks about particular works by Ernaux by first stating that her writing reads like a confessional of personal experience and of the emotions that were derived from it, and that it is difficult to distinguish between her novels and her memoir, as she blurs the lines between fiction and nonfiction. Her ability to bare her soul and the language that she uses to do so are usually highly complimented. For instance, Donna Seaman, writing for Booklist, calls Sham "a terse and powerful memoir." Seaman compares Ernaux's ability to investigate her emotions to the "precision of a scientist." She commends the author's "beautifully crafted and unsettling narrative" for its descriptions of the intimate details of living in a small town in France in the 1950s.

Ernaux's writing follows a minimalist style, which on a grammatical level eliminates most adjectives and adverbs and on...