Boş Dolaplar

Operates a small cafe-grocery store A happy childhood shaped around the parents, school life, a new social environment, alienation, the desire to move up the grade, the need for approval, outbursts of anger, shame, abortion... Empty Cabinets, which is also the harbinger of the auto-sociobiography literature that extends for years, is written in two separate stories. The story of Denise Lesur, a young girl stuck between the world - the uneducated working class and the educated bourgeois class - trying to rebuild herself against everything her family represents with her successes in school life.

Ernaux is as cautious and brave as ever when describing the life of her autobiographical character, Denise, who has to struggle with what she is rather than what she wants to be and who suffers from the pains of social ascension. .

“Ernaux's books are not confessions, but a kind of personal epistemology... Reading them is an attempt to understand that incomprehensible, painful, necessary process of 'becoming'.”

The New Yorker

“Empty Cupboards, about the class system in France in the 1950s And it is more than a woman's struggle to move up the class and forget her past. This novel makes an unforgettable contribution to the culturally disenfranchised speaking with their own voices, both in terms of its subject and in its literary form.”

The Bloomsbury Review