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, observing his painful, gradual separation from the "most beloved creature in the world" and recording the stages of the grieving process. It is an exceptional chronicle of emotions, memories, and melancholic reflections, in which the author attempts to answer the question of how to cope with the void left by loss, and how the experience of grief, both private and simultaneously shared by all humans, can be transformed into a work. This is because the "Mourning Diary" is the origin of "The Bright Chamber," as well as the other works that Roland Barthes wrote during that period, all of which are sealed by the death of his mother.

On October 25, 1977, Henriette, the mother of Roland Barthes, died. Already from the day after her funeral, the author of "Mythologies," "Fragments of the Lover's Discourse," and "The Empire of Signs" begins to systematically keep a diary, observing 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 counteract the tearing of oblivion, to the extent that it is announced as absolute."
(The Books' Journal)