https://shawjonathan.com/2023/02/18/annie-ernauxs-girls-story/ ( )

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.

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 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. ( )

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 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." ( )

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 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. ( )