Between 2001 and 2007, Louise Bourgeois made seven folios on cloth which would become known as her fabric books. The second book in the series, Ode à l’oubli (2002), is notable for its abstract imagery as well as the autobiographical resonance of its materials, including handkerchiefs and clothes taken from the artist’s marriage chest, which she had kept since 1937. Offering a close analysis of the relationship between abstraction and autobiography at play in this work, Moran Sheleg examines the role of memory central to Bourgeois’s practice and its relationship to that of other figures evoked through it, namely Marcel Proust and Sigmund Freud. Although the artist’s work has often been linked to the practice of weaving and its psychoanalytic as well as autobiographical associations, the book’s facture is closer to the binding of a codex than the metaphorical stitching up of a psychic wound. Looking at novelist Rachel Cusk’s memoir of her experiences as a new mother, A Life’s Work (2009), and her essays on Bourgeois, it is argued that the longing to forget is bound up with the act of remembering which is performed through these works. The cutting and stitching together of the book’s pages in this way mirrors the process of writing and recollection through which certain bits and pieces of memory are discarded only to resurface later. What is re-membered here specifically is the maternal subject, who is given a voice previously denied her by psychoanalysis and literature. Sheleg proceeds to argue that Bourgeois’s work constitutes a form of anti-memoir that flits between autobiography and fiction, operating through the mutually dependent acts of retrieving and obliviating involved in the artwork that doubles as a ‘lifework’.