I Remain In Darkness

"A small, powerful, and overwritten memoir of a mother’s slow deterioration and death in a nursing home... The impact of this courageous, sometimes unsubtle little book is sure to not pass away quickly."   -  Kirkus Reviews

In the summer of 1983, Annie Ernaux's mother fell ill and stopped eating and drinking for several days. Her memory started to lapse and later the same year she was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease. This collection of relentlessly honest journal entries traces the descent of Ernaux's mother into the depths of disease and reveals the author's own complex feelings of guilt and responsibility. Profoundly self-revealing, it is a work that will provide readers with insight into their own questions of loss and grief.

"As always, Ernaux's marriage of opposites - disgust and adoration, revulsion and emulation, dirt-physical and heady-theoretical - takes place on the whitest of pages. Ernaux's opposites rip her in two in spite of her spare languages ... [Her] art is in her fight with words."  -  Los Angeles Time

I Remain in Darkness is a new high watermark for Ernaux, surging with raw emotional power and her sublime ability to use language to apprehend her own life's particular music. An extraordinary evocation of a grown daughter's attachment to her mother, and of both women's strength and resiliency.