In this book, written in a clinical and distant style, the narrator takes an uncompromising look back at her life as a married woman. Born into a modest family, surrounded by strong female figures and raised by parents whose image is far removed from traditional family clichés, Annie Ernaux describes the tedious progression towards adulthood and marriage, towards immobility and self-denial. She shows the slow work of undermining by society, the social pressure and the force of attraction of normality that crush without apparent violence the identity of this young woman full of hopes and desires. Slowly but surely, she marries, abandons her dreams and her studies, melts into the role of the model housewife and has children. Behind this apparent choice of domestic and family life, it is a sacrifice too enormous for the narrator who exposes the process of domination and control that intrudes into her very thoughts.

We perceive a lot of resentment and sarcasm in this dense and precise text where Annie Ernaux seems to question with dismay the renunciation of herself and her identity. La Femme gelée is a claustrophobic and powerful book, built like a Bildunsgroman in reverse, where the narrator tells of her slow decline into the immobility of domestic life. When we close the book after the last page, we are seized by the strength of the analysis that Annie Ernaux has deployed to expose the springs and the spiral of male domination.

We read this book in the winter of 2022.