Book Review: "A Girl's Story" by Annie Ernaux

It's the end of April 2025 and I know I always start with the rough dates but I do need to say something about that. Often people ask me how I'm able to release new content every day. This book review probably won't be released until June or something I don't know, I sort of choose them at random by this point. Sometimes I work through chronologically to when I wrote something but other times I release what I think sounds good. The truth is, I've got quite the backlog on here in my drafts. So don't get upset about it, I have been writing like this for a while so there's a lot of stories in my drafts sitting around waiting to be released.

After reading A Simple Passion by Annie Ernaux, I think there is a clear pattern in her work...

In the summer of 1958, 18-year-old Annie Ernaux leaves her sheltered life in Normandy to work as a camp counselor. She starts to have her first taste of independence and she starts to navigate herself around these new environments. Honestly, it starts with the same fire of passion that A Simple Passion starts with and I think perhaps I should have read this one first because it feels like this is the logical first one. However, we also have the pattern that she falls in love with a man who is older than she is.

This man is referred to as "H" and they fall into a weird passionate relationship yet, as you read it you can tell that the power dynamics are all messed up. She suffers an ostracisation from her friends after this encounter with "H" and this creates a huge sense of shame and disappointment for her as well. Her life kind of goes into a deep and dark hole for a while. I can honestly say that this is pretty much the exact same thing that happens in A Simple Passion when the love affair finally ends.

One really interesting thing about this book is that the memories are constructed afterwards and so, the writer acknowledges the difference between constructed memories and actual events. There is something really unreliable about memory which means that eventually, it becomes eroded over time. This is a similar thing that I have found in other Fitzcarraldo Editions such as In Memory of Memory by Maria Stepanova and even other Annie Ernaux books. There seems to be a weird divide between what is actually a memory and what is believed to be a memory. It really makes you think about the way in which you remember the events of your own life and whether they are real, constructed or even false altogether because you think you're supposed to remember them.

We all know that writing is cathartic to us, but Annie Ernaux goes one step further in which writing becomes a form of liberation for these memories for these mistakes, for this time in her life whether she has to remember everything as it comes to her. She confronts and examines her emotions with a critical eye, looking at why she thought the things she did when she was of that age. This is very interesting because someone who is now older is looking back at her younger self as almost a different person. It delves into the different societal expectations of women, looking at them as people who do have a sexual leaning even though some men would not like to think so. I don't believe this idea is as liberating as the author likes to think but I can understand where she is coming from.

All in all, I think I really enjoyed this book but there were some parts of it where I wasn't so sure at all. Annie Ernaux's writing is more sentimental here than it is in A Simple Passion, but the other book is more coherent. However, there is a clear line between the two of them, linking them in story and theme and I think it really gives us a flavour of what to expect of other works by her. Anyways, I hope I do read more of her books because it might show me more of her story. I hope it does.

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