In La Honte (1997), Annie Ernaux describes a painful childhood experience to which she makes no explicit reference in previous accounts of her youth. [1] In that "ecriture plate" [2] which has been her signature style since 1984, she writes: "Mon pere a voulu tuer ma mere un dimanche de juin, au debut de l'apres-midi" (13). It quickly becomes evident that this "scene," which Ernaux attempts to narrate in the first part of La Honte and to understand throughout the rest of it, left a deep impression on her. My project here is to explore this revelatory text, along with interviews with the writer, in order to understand why this scene was not included in the previous texts that meticulously narrate and re-narrate precisely the time period in which it took place. The most obvious answer is that Ernaux was ashamed of what happened that June day in 1952, as the title of her book suggests. Yet she is not a writer who shies away from personal revelation, having described elsewhere in her autobiographical work an ille gal abortion (Les Armoires vides [1977]) and an obsessive passion for a married man (Passion simple [1991]). What, then, kept Ernaux, or rather her narrator, from narrating this important episode for over twenty years, and what desires or needs finally pushed her from silence to narration? What does she hope to accomplish by mining some very painful and deeply-buried memories and exposing her findings to the reader? The narrator's description of the "scene" (as she herself refers to the event) fills only three pages of the 133-page text. In the interest of brevity, I will reproduce only what might be called the "essential" lines of it here. The events described take place on a Sunday afternoon after an ordinary family dinner. Ma mere etait de mauvaise humeur. La dispute qu'elle avait entreprise avec mon pere, sitot assise, n'a pas cesse durant tout le repas. La vaisselle debarrassee, la toile ciree essuyee, elle a continue d'adresser des reproches a mon pere, en tournant dans la cuisine, minuscule-coincee entre le cafe, l'epicerie et 'escalier menant a l'etage --, comme a chaque fois qu'elle etait contrariee. Mon pere etait reste assis a table, sans repondre, la tete tournee vers la fenetre. D'un seul coup, il s'est mis a trembler convulsivement et a souffler. Il s'est leve et je l'ai vu empoigner ma mere, a la trainer dans le cafe en craint avec une voix rauque, inconnue. Je me suis sauvee a l'etage et je me suis jetee sur mon lit, la tete dans un coussin. Puis j'ai entendu ma mere hurler: "Ma fille!" Sa voix venait de la cave, a cote du cafe. Je me suis precipitee au bas de l'escalier, j'appelais "Au secours!" de toutes mes forces. Dans la cave mal eclairee, mon pere agrippait ma mere par les epaules, ou le cou. Dans son autre m ain, il tenait la serpe a couper le bois qu'il avait arrachee du billot ou elle etait ordinairement plantee. Je ne me souviens plus ici que de sanglots et de cris. Ensuite, nous nous trouvons de nouveau tous les trois dans la cuisine. (14-5) "J'ecris cette scene pour la premiere fois," the narrator states, and indeed the scene is explicitly mentioned nowhere else in Ernaux's oeuvre. However, the narrator of La Place, a text about her social and emotional alienation from her father due to her ascension into the bourgeoisie, does speak of her parents' frequent shouting matches: "Sous l'insulte, sortant de son calme habituel: 'CARNE! J'aurais mieux fait de te laisser ou tu etais.' Echange hebdomadaire: Zero!-Cinglee! Triste individu!-Vieille garce! / Etc. Sans aucune importance" (La Place 71). Her insistence that these kinds of exchanges were "sans aucune importance" is perhaps comprehensible in that normally thee battles remained entirely verbal-except, as La Honte's narrator reveals, for one day in June 1952. This passage is followed by a blank space on the page, and while these spaces are somewhat common in Ernaux's later texts, which are organized episodically, the reader of La Honte might see this particular blank as something more (or rather l ess): that is, as representing quite literally a hole or paralipsis [3] in the childhood account that La Place's narrator supplies. …