Mémoire de fille

In 1958, Annie Ernaux, aged eighteen, spent a summer as a counselor at a holiday camp in Normandy, where she had her first sexual experience with a male counselor, an event followed by humiliation and a long period of self-punishment. Writing decades later, she goes back to that summer to examine the girl she was, using photographs, letters, and her own diary. She questions what memory can recover and how a young woman's body and reputation were judged.

This short memoir suits readers of autobiographical writing, women's experience, and French literature. It is spare and exact, and good for those who want to see how Ernaux treats memory as a form of research.

Deep, inward-looking and contemplative; a moderate read.

Best for readers like The Mindful Reader. Which reader are you?