An elderly woman with Alzheimer's disease dies in the geriatric ward of a hospital in the suburbs of Paris. Her daughter, writer Annie Ernault, trying to cope with the loss, takes on a new book, which unfolds the story of one human destiny - a woman born into a poor Norman family before the First World War and who spent her entire life striving to overcome the boundaries of her class. “I think I’m writing about my mother because it’s my turn to give birth to her,” Erno explains his undertaking and lives in the letter scene by scene from his mother’s life until her extinction, dwelling on individual episodes of his difficult relationship with his mother with dispassion. biographer - and the inconsolability of her daughter, left alone with an irreparable lack.