I Remain in Darkness Book

Written in journal form, Annie Ernaux's account of her mother's steady decline spans a period of nearly three years. When her mother first becomes ill, Ernaux takes her in. Soon, it becomes painfully obvious that professional help is needed. Diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease, her mother enters a nursing home, never to leave. As it explores the complexities of death and parent-child role reversal, Ernaux's latest work takes its place on the shelf beside John Bayley's Elegy for Iris and Roger Kamenetz's Terra Infirma. "As revealed by Ernaux, the details of a loved one's deterioration have such emblematic force and terror that the particular becomes universal." - The New York Times Book Review

Library Journal

Unlike Aaron Alterra's The Caregiver (LJ 10/15/99), this slim volume by noted French writer Ernaux (Simple Passion) is not a straightforward medical account of her mother's death from Alzheimer's; instead, it is a collection of the notes, in their original form, that Ernaux jotted down at the time of her mother's illness. "When I write down all these things, I scribble away as fast as I can (as if I felt guilty), without choosing my words." Here in their raw, uncensored form are the "vestiges of pain"--the anger, guilt, and grief that Ernaux felt during her mother's two-year decline. Here are the graphic images of her once-powerful mother wearing diapers, the woman in the next bed peeing on the floor, a drawer in the bedside table filled with a human turd. Because the notes have not been edited, there is a choppy, unpolished feel to the book, which is perhaps Ernaux's intention--as a possible counterpoint to A Woman's Story (1991), her fictionalized memoir of her mother's life and death. For literary and Alzheimer's collections.--Wilda Williams, "Library Journal" Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.