La Place and Une femme signal a marked evolution in Ernaux's writing project. As Chapter 2 illustrates, that evolution is nonetheless foreshadowed by the transitional status of La Femme gelée, a text which can be seen to bridge the emotional intensity of the earlier works and the more reconciliatory attitude towards the past portrayed in La Place and Une femme. The nostalgia for childhood in La Femme gelée and the narrator's ability to perceive her parents’ characteristics as resulting from a combination of historical and social circumstances, rather than existing solely to frustrate her desires, pre-empt the greater narrative empathy of the later works. The occasional use of metacommentary in La Femme gelée also paves the way for the increasing abandonment of the fictional façade in Ernaux's subsequent writing, as the auto/biographical comes to the fore. The instances of metacommentary first employed in La Femme gelée become more prominent in La Place and Une femme both in their typographical separation from the main narrative and in their explicatory function of the narrator's perception of the role of writing and language generally. While the narrator in La Femme gelée occasionally refers to her position as retrospective writer, she does not discuss the act of literary composition. The fictional status of the earlier works renders a description of the writing process extraneous, the narrators’ aim being to establish the truthfulness of their theses, rather than digress on the most appropriate literary means of doing so. In La Place and Une femme, however, the narrator is explicitly portraying her ‘real-life’ parents, and feels a moral duty to provide an accurate depiction of them, a depiction clearly facilitated by instructing the reader of her ‘writerly’ intentions throughout.When compared to the early trilogy, La Place and Une femme constitute ‘more overtly “authentic” narratives’ both in their extensive incorporation of auto/biographical details without recourse to a fictional medium and in their representation of the difficulties encountered in achieving an accurate literary transcription of these details.