What are the motifs in Shame by Annie Ernaux?

Childhood memories are a recurring idea. Ernaux writes this book from a vantage point of at least three decades removed from the events she writes about. She tries to remember as objectively as she can what happened on a day in the summer of 1952. It is this day that not only robbed her of her childhood but affected the rest of her life. The event was her father's attempted murder of her mother, or at least that is how Ernaux remembers it.