In A Girl's Story, her latest book, Annie Ernaux revisits the summer of 1958, spent working as a holiday camp instructor in Normandy, and recounts the first night she spent with a man. When he moves on, she realizes she has submitted her will to his and finds that she is a slave without a master. Now, sixty years later, she finds she can obliterate the intervening years and return to consider this young woman whom she wanted to forget completely. In writing A Girl's Story, which brings to life her indelible memories of that summer, Ernaux discovers that here was the vital, violent and dolorous origin of her writing life, built out of shame, violence and betrayal.
'Another deeply felt, fearlessly honest exploration of female desire, shame, and intellectual passion from the incomparable Annie Ernaux.' - Sigrid Nunez, author of The Friend
In A Girl's Story, her latest book, Annie Ernaux revisits the summer of 1958, spent working as a holiday camp instructor in Normandy, and recounts the first night she spent with a man. When he moves on, she realizes she has submitted her will to his and finds that she is a slave without a master. Now, sixty years later, she finds she can obliterate the intervening years and return to consider this young woman whom she wanted to forget completely. In writing A Girl's Story, which brings to life her indelible memories of that summer, Ernaux discovers that here was the vital, violent and dolorous origin of her writing life, built out of shame, violence and betrayal.
'Another deeply felt, fearlessly honest exploration of female desire, shame, and intellectual passion from the incomparable Annie Ernaux.' - Sigrid Nunez, author of The Friend
Born in 1940, Annie Ernaux grew up in Normandy, studied at Rouen University, and later taught at secondary school. From 1977 to 2000, she was a professor at the Centre National d'Enseignement par Correspondance. Her books, in particular A Man's Place and A Woman's Story, have become contemporary classics in France. The Years won the Prix Renaudot in France in 2008, the Premio Strega in Italy in 2016, and was shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize in 2019. In 2017, Annie Ernaux was awarded the Marguerite Yourcenar Prize for her life's work.
'Ernaux is an unusual memoirist: she distrusts her memory... Ernaux
does not so much reveal the pastshe does not pretend to have any
authoritative access to itas unpack it.' Madeleine Schwartz, New
Yorker
'A profound and beautiful examination of the impenetrable wall that
time erects between the self we are, and the selves we once were. I
know of no other book that so vividly illustrates the frustrations
and the temptations of that barrier, and our heartache and longing
in trying to breach it. Annie Ernaux is one of my favorite
contemporary writers, original and true. Always after reading one
of her books, I walk around in her world for months.' Sheila Heti,
author of Motherhood
'Annie Ernaux writes memoir with such generosity and vulnerable
power that I find it difficult to separate my own memories from
hers long after I've finished reading. In A Girl's Story she
detangles an adolescence rife with desire and shame, an era of both
internal and external debasement. Ernaux wisely ventures into the
gray areas of her memories; she doesn't attempt to transcend their
power, nor to even "understand" them, but to press them firmly into
this diamond of a book.' -- Catherine Lacey, author of Pew
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