A girl’s story by Annie Earnaux

A Girl’s Story by Annie Ernaux

French non-fiction

Original title – Mémoire de fille

Translator – Alison L Strayer

Source – Library book

I intend to work through all of Ernaux’s books over time this is the 5th book by her I will have reviewed on the blog. Which is just a fraction of her works with a number to still be translated I can see me reviewing her books for the next few years. She won the Nobel and it was deserved she is a great advocate of auto-fiction memoir, few writers have taken apart their lives like she has over time. I last saw her go back over an affair in her late middle age and now we find her as a young girl in the fifties becoming a woman a summer at a summer camp and those years we all had when we find who we are sexually as people. But also how fragile we can be in those years.

She is disconcerted by the mingling of the sexes, unprepared for simple camaraderie between boys and girls employed to do the same job. The situation is unfamiliar.Basically, she only knows how to talk to boys with the kind of verbal sparring, at once enticing and derisive, that girls use when a group of boys follows them in the streets – defending themselves while leading them on.At the meeting that is held before the children’s arrival, she glances around at the fifteen-odd boys and finds that none correspond to her dream of falling passionately in love.

A different time but they do mingle later on

This is a book that seems she could have only written years later it takes her own life back to one summer as a young girl on the verge of sexual awakening as she spent a summer at summer camping Normandy. But she also tackles her own problems she had at that time with her own Body image, which led to her having Bulima as it is called now this is a looking back at things and how we maybe understand more of events 60 years later than we did at the time. How other events that summer other encounters scared her for life and affected her life more than she knew at the time this a writer looking back after the Me Too movement at events many years ago in a new light. I love how she does this, she also teases us with gems about the books she was reading at the time I will be going back at some point and looking at the books she mentions. I have a couple I think she mentions Sagan and Gide both of whom I have books from. She captures the difference between males and females at a certain age back then and desire and how it sometimes went too far and how the other half viewed her and other women last the time.

The place, too, is real. In my memory, it has gradually metamorphosed into a kind of castle, a cross between Les Sablonnières in Le Grand Meaulnes and the palace in Last Year at Marienbad. I tried to find it again in the autumn of 1995 while driving home from Saint-Malo, without success. I was forced to park in the high street of Sand ask a tobacconist how to get to the sanatorium, and when she gazed back at me blankly, as if she had never heard of it, I added, ‘The old medico-educational institute, I believe.’ I only discovered today on the Internet that the place was once an abbey, founded in the Middle Ages. Demolished, rebuilt, and transformed over the centuries. Cannot be visited except on national heritage days.

I could picture this place so well from this one small passage .

I think this is a book she had to wait to write it is filled with looks back at that summer and that time. I imagine it seems very different than it did at the time and how much values have changed but also the dynamics between men and women this is a world just after the war and just at the start lof teenagers being free in a way that hadn’t been for years. As I say seems to be part of the ME TOO movement it came out in 2016 just as people started to reveal things that had happened and like Annie as she recounts events from that summer and sees them in a new light how male violence is always there and how it can affect a lifetime from the first sexual encounter but also other events sexually that summer with an older man but this is a French trade on those events in a way an Annie look at those events many years ago, How much she hated herself now as she was then is eye-opening. She doesn’t have to go to confession because she writes them and we can read them !! Have you read this book by Ernaux ?

Winstons score – B solid piece of her childhood years growing up in a different time to now.