A Girl's Story

By: Annie Ernaux, Alison L. Strayer

Narrated by: Tavia Gilbert

In A Girl's Story, Annie Ernaux revisits a night 50 years earlier when she found herself submerged and controlled by another person's desire and willpower. It was the summer of 1958, the year she turned 18, and the man she had given herself to had moved on. She'd submitted her will to his and then found that she was a slave without a master.

Now, 50 years later, she realizes she can obliterate the intervening years and return to consider the young woman who, until now, she had wanted to forget completely. And, in the process, she also discovers that this was the vital, violent, and dolorous origin of her writing life - her writer's identity, built out of shame, violence, and betrayal.

©2020 Annie Ernaux and Alison L. Strayer (P)2020 Dreamscape Media, LLC

A sublime story familiar to every girl

At the same time intimate and universal. Ernaux reflects on the stories our head creates from the events we experience and the effects of time on those stories.

horrifying pronunciation

If you are oaid to read a book with tons of French phrases you shoul bother to learn how to pronounce them so they are at least intelligible. Did not manage to tolerate the whoke thing.

A memoir done in a very entrancing style

I enjoyed the style of writing this memoir and her description is so spot on, I half thought it was my own story - very relatable.

An exploration of dissociated narrative

This book shows painstaking world. attention to the emotional consequences of sexual abuse. The story she couldn’t share as a girl overlays most of her thoughts as she tries to assess its impact and describe the consequences to her life. It is the reader’s good fortune that Ernaux became a “literary person,” at once both a great narrator of her struggle and a created persona who must conceal so much of herself in the world. Abuse survivors often tell their stories in ways that seem dissociated or disconnected from their experiences. Ernaux’s writing is often characterized as clinical or cold, but I think we need to approach it as we would approach any trauma survivor to understand its cause more accurately.

Awful narrator

Reading experience ruined by the narrator, whose French among other things is atrocious. Made the prose lose its evocative power.