Reviewed by Robert P. Moyer<\/p>\n
A GIRL\u2019S STORY. By Annie Ernaux. Seven Stories Press. 160 pages. $18.95<\/p>\n
Shame and humiliation. She spent two nights with a man, then fixated on him, in 1958, earning the\u00a0name \u201cwhore around the edges\u201d from her colleagues. She carried that shame with her for 58 years, until she decided to write a book about how that girl\u2019s life was \u201c… endowed by shame\u2019s vast memory.\u201d<\/p>\n
The result is this marvelous autofiction, in which an accomplished, prize-winning novelist considers an 18-year old petit bourgeois provincial girl. She does not fictionalize the girl, but deconstructs \u201c…the girl I was.\u201d She approaches the girl as \u201c…a stranger who imparts her memory\u201d to her. When she has merged with the girl,\u00a0she steps into the \u201cterrain\u201d of her past \u2014\u201csocially, familial and sexual.\u201d\u00a0 Once there, she \u201c…writes to unearth something that emerges from the creases when a story is unfolded.\u201d<\/p>\n
A flood of \u201csomethings\u201d emerges \u2014 poems, movies, pieces of clothing, looks on peoples\u2019 faces, denial. She covers things rarely mentioned in literature, like the \u201cmuddle\u201d that occurs when one tries to find \u201c…a way to earn a living,\u201d as she stumbles into and out of a teaching career. With an immediacy to her prose, captured aptly by the translation here, she writes\u00a0 \u201cendangered, as when one is writing about the living.\u201d\u00a0Her immersion into that girl\u2019s life takes her to a park bench in England, totally unexpected, where she recognizes the moment \u201c… I started to make a literary being of myself.\u201d<\/p>\n
Few writers can match Annie Ernaux\u2019s concision, as she strives to \u201c…make one feel the immense breadth and depth of a summer of youth in the two hours it takes to read one hundred pages.\u201d\u00a0And her stark images stand out in memory; nowhere else will you find Kant and the phrase \u201csperm in the mouth\u201d in the same paragraph (if you do, let me know).<\/p>\n
Her remarkable journey to realization and resolution comes to us as if A Girl\u2019s Story<\/em> were told by \u201c… people we hear talking about her through a door.\u201d\u00a0 It is both revealing, and riveting.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Reviewed by Robert P. Moyer A GIRL\u2019S STORY. By Annie Ernaux. Seven Stories Press. 160 pages. $18.95 Shame and humiliation. She spent two nights with a man, then fixated on him, in 1958, earning the\u00a0name \u201cwhore around the edges\u201d from her colleagues. She carried that shame with her for 58 years, until she decided to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[252,10,253,1],"tags":[1163,1162],"class_list":["post-2687","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-autobiography","category-contemporary-nonfiction","category-memoir-biography","category-uncategorized","tag-a-girls-story","tag-annie-ernaux"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2687","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2687"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2687\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3150,"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2687\/revisions\/3150"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2687"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2687"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2687"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}