A Girl's Story

Some fifty years later, Ernaux looks back on herself in 1958, the summer she turned 18 and worked as a camp counselor. She had a sexual encounter there, which was deeply meaningful to her at the time, and reflects on both what happened and her distance now from the girl she was then.

This book appears to be more a straight up memoir than the autofiction of the books of Ernaux's I've read before, but still has her signature style of writing about her memories and also talking about the writing process as she goes ("On this gray November Sunday in 2014, I watch the girl who was me watch him turn his back on her in front of all the others..."). It's especially effective here in illustrating that weird sort of dichotomy that happens as you show more look back at a memory that once held deep emotion in the original experience, but now has a sort of remove. Which is, essentially, what the book is about.

The "girl of '58" leaves her small town and parochial school, works as a camp counselor, and has sexual experiences. One other counselor, H, is the object of her affections, but though he has sex with her, he's largely indifferent to her (and has a fiancee whom he tells her is the only girl he loves) though this summer is a life-changing experience for her. I didn't expect to be as pulled into her story as I was, as Ernaux was able to make me sympathize with her naivete (even while I thought her choices foolish), and she largely keeps from judging her younger self - and H himself. The second part of the book, outlining the year or two that followed that summer, were less compelling and didn't have that same immediacy. It was almost like she wasn't sure where to stop the story, and maybe carried on a little too long before a rather abrupt ending. Though it's not as good as A Man's Place or A Woman's Story, it was well worth the time spent reading. show less

A Writer Begins, 1958
Review of the Seven Stories Press paperback edition (April 2020) translated from the original French language "Mémoire de fille" (April 2016) by Alison L. Strayer

A suspicion: obscurely, I may have wished to unfold this period of my life to test the limits of writing, push the closeness to reality as far as it would go (and I would go so far as to judge my previous books as vague approximations in this regard). - excerpt from A Girl's Story pg. 55.

In A Girl's Story, memoirist Annie Ernaux looks back almost 60 years to when she first left home to work as a summer school counsellor in 1958 and then her subsequent early education and time as an au pair in England. The period covers her first sexual experiences, her show more life passage from youth, her struggle with then-undiagnosed bulimia & its effects on her body, and then finally her awakening desire to become a writer.

The effectiveness of this raw writing is not only one's empathy for Ernaux's experience but also its motivation to think back on one's own life in such terms after many decades of passage. I found myself remembering many events that I had not thought of for years. This was all regardless of how much I could personally identify with Ernaux as a young woman, although she could make me feel all of that at times as well. Such is Ernaux's remarkable ability as a writer and communicator.

I am not a culture hound, the only thing that matters to me is to seize life and time, understand, and take pleasure.
Is this the greatest truth of all in this story? - excerpt from A Girl's Story pgs. 149-150.

I'll confess that I hadn't paid much notice to the memoirs of Annie Ernaux (1940-) until the recent attention of the film based on her L'Evénement (2000, translated as Happening (2019) by Tanya Leslie winning the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival 2021 and the recent speculation about a future possible Nobel Prize for Literature. Having now read and been impressed by both Happening and A Girl's Story it is safe to say that I plan to read everything that I can find that she wrote, probably going on next to The Years (2008 orig/2017 translation).

{...] there is this phrase by Nietzsche that I find so beautiful: We have Art in order not to die of the Truth.* - excerpt from A Girl's Story pg. 152.

I read A Girl's Story as part of my investigation of the longlist for the 2021 Warwick Prize for Women in Translation.

* Original: “Wir haben die Kunst, damit wir nicht an der Wahrheit zugrunde gehen.”, sometimes also translated as "We have Art, so that we will not perish from Reality." show less

In her most recent book, Ernaux goes back to a phase of her life she's deliberately skipped over in her earlier books, because she hasn't been able to find any real connection with the person she was then, the eighteen-year-old Annie Duchesne of the summer of 1958, at last free of parental supervision to spend a couple of months working as a monitor at a summer camp, and eager for that, enormously meaningful, first sexual experience which she knows that narrative inevitability is going to provide for. Needless to say, it doesn't work out the way she imagined it, she makes a fool of herself and gets into one of those self-hating phases of growing-up that most of us have the misfortune to go through at some point. All very banal in show more substance, but the way Ernaux engages with her teen self from the perspective of a novelist in her seventies brings all that adolescent misery to life in a way that is anything but banal. There's a lot that is quite specific to what it was like to be a young woman in the late fifties - someone who had grown up with expectations shaped by romantic films and women's magazines but was just about to get the chance to read La deuxième sexe - but there's also a good deal that is much more general than that, about being young and dealing with the obligation to create a future for yourself to meet the expectations of your parents, teachers and peers. And living things as though they are going to be written one day. Very interesting, sometimes painful, sometimes touching, sometimes very funny. show less

Fascinating. Ernaux casts the various versions of Annie as different people entirely. It seems not so much a memoir as a biography of a person Ernaux knows vaguely. In the end it becomes a look at how we disempower women, never invest them with a sense of their own agency through coddling and withholding their sexuality and limiting their options and overstating the importance of going along. That the only way for girls and women to assert their personhood is by eating away at themselves through self harm of various sorts or by being mean to the people who are kind enough not to be cruel or limiting to them.

It is funny, she says (or at least this is my interpretation of what she says) that the point is to fit together the somethingness show more of that which went before into the nothingness of the now, and that is not at all what I would have thought. The point seems to be that we contain multitudes and that for women the strength and goodness within most of those multitudes get snuffed out by others (including some who mean well like her parents) or that we ourselves destroy what is good because it is the only thing we can control. show less

This is my second Ernaux, after [b:The Years|40491227|The Years|Annie Ernaux|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1528419215l/40491227._SY75_.jpg|3110233], and I read it in preparation for a face to face book club discussion. This book felt much more focused and personal than the vast canvas of The Years, but perhaps also less universal. It looks back from 50 years distance at a couple of formative years in her early adulthood, and although the story is a rites of passage one, Ernaux's unflinching honesty and self-criticism makes it quite a disturbing read at times.

Although a memoir, it reads almost like the story of a third person. Ernaux is quite detached from her former self - critical and quite judgemental.
She describes dreadful situations in an almost clinical way as if she feels little sympathy for the person, herself, experiencing them. It is a very new form of writing for me - the honesty is shocking at times. A wonderful read.

Ho comprato questo libro perché da diverso tempo vedevo il nome di Annie Ernaux qui su GR e Anobii, sono un po' scarsa in letteratura francese e quindi quando l'ho visto nella caotica libreria dell'amico Flavio ho deciso di prenderlo. Il primo impatto è stato respingente, mi chiedevo costantemente cosa mi facesse voltare pagina. Come ho già detto per la ciabatti, in questo momento non mi va tanto di addentrarmi nei monologhi interiori (più o meno autoccommiseranti) e leggere questo memoir è impegnativo, perché non è romanzatissimo, c'è un continuo salto avanti indietro nel tempo, fra la memoria e l'ora, oltre ad altri recenti passati in cui si cercava di rievocare la memoria. Quindi si, la lettura era parecchio pesante, dopo show more poche pagine finivo per addormentarmi sul divano. Poi un po' alla volta sono entrata in sincronia con l'autrice e ci ho trovato il la. Strano leggere dell'educazione sentimentale di una fanciulla in fiore a quasi 43 anni, ma avvincente. Bello poi aver trovato i riferimenti alla Sagan di Bonjour Tristesse e a Pamela Moore di Cioccolata a colazione. Così mi sono tuffata in weekend di letture sullo sviluppo delle giovani donne e il loro aprirsi alla vita. davvero avvincente. show less