From October 26, 1977, the day after his mother's death, until September 15, 1979, Roland Barthes kept a "mourning diary," as he called it, tracking the painful, gradual separation from "the most beloved creature in the world" and documenting the stages of the grieving process.

This is an extraordinary chronicle of feelings, memories, and melancholic reflections, in which the author attempts to answer the question of how to deal with the void left by loss, as well as how the experience of grief, so private yet so common among people, can be transformed into work.

This is because the "Mourning Diary" serves as the foundational source of "The Light Room," as well as other works that Roland Barthes wrote during that period, all of which are marked by the death of his mother.

On October 25, 1977, Henriette, Roland Barthes's mother, passed away. Already from the day after her passing, the author of "Mythologies," "Fragments of a Lover's Discourse," and "The Empire of Signs" begins to systematically keep a diary, tracking, day by day, the "chaotic" sequence of his emotions.

"To write in order to remember?" he wonders somewhere in these diary notes. "Not to remember myself," he answers, "but to combat the anguish of oblivion, to the extent that it announces itself as absolute."