In Une Femme (c. 1987), an autobiographical story by French writer Annie Ernaux, the challenge of writing is to gather from memory what has been scattered over time until it manages to raise the ethical profile of the narrator’s mother being and person. Using the flow of everyday life as a resource, the narrator braids for the reader the thread of two lives (mother and daughter), closely interweaving these two lives within the social context. Even though the flow of feelings between two people is as variable as its projection in memory, these are precisely the two sources from which Ernaux extracts the necessary signals to shape her story. A meaning not often considered for the verb "collect" illustrates a different conveyance of "to infer or deduce", which are the focus of its meaning, expressed in transitive uses. Said sense, which may well correspond to the material order as well as to the immaterial one, indicates that when colligating, something that has been disintegrated, or scattered, is recomposed. This idea is inherent to the type of operations carried out by memory, which does not operate chaotically, but in a staggered way, by linking loose pieces. In Une Femme one can appreciate, in a fundamentally ethical register, the process of deducing that the narrator's memory carries out in order not to disfigure, or misinterpret, the role of form and function, of the mother. For critical discourse, it is not easy to judge whether the elements considered carry out the transcription of a woman's life, as offered in this work by Ernaux, are adjusted to reality or are the object of self- fiction, but Ella's profile as a person allows us to ask: Is that kind of reconfiguration that is consigned there an ethical motivation or merely fictional? The exposition in Une Femme is subtly ambiguous: objective and subjective; prosaic and poetic; ethical and social. This article intends to enter this disquisition seeking to identify the motives of the correspondence between "a woman" (the mother of the narrator), who is the subject of the experience, in front of the character built in the narrative under the name "Elle".
