In the geriatric ward of a hospital in the Paris suburbs, an elderly woman with Alzheimer's disease dies. Her daughter, the writer Annie Ernaux, struggling to cope with the loss, begins a new book that unfolds the story of one woman's life – a woman born into a poor Norman family before the First World War and who spent her entire life striving to transcend the boundaries of her class. "I think I'm writing about my mother because it's my turn to bring her into the world," Ernaux explains her undertaking, recounting in her letter, scene by scene, her mother's life until her death, dwelling on individual episodes of their complex relationship with the dispassion of a biographer – and the inconsolability of a daughter left alone with an irreparable loss.