A Girl's Story

"I discovered Ernaux only recently and I’m so excited that there are now so many books for me to read. People kept recommending this to me, and you know how, when you sense something is going to be really important to you, you are almost resistant to it? So I kept putting off reading it. Then I found this beautiful edition from Fitzcarraldo and decided it was time. I do believe in books coming into your life just when you need them. This book goes back to her time at summer camp in Normandy in 1958, and her first traumatic sexual experience that she had never made sense of. She returns to that event and its repercussions in her life over the years. What I loved about this book in particular was in the craft of it. She talks about herself as that girl in the third person. She carries the memories and repercussions, but that girl is almost a stranger to her. She’s trying to see her clear-sightedly on the page and return to her, but with the understanding that it is an impossible task to bridge the distance between her now and her then. She uses no tricks of the trade to make you feel like you are having a cohesive experience of the past; we’re involved in the process of remembering and misremembering with her. That makes it feel very real and very vital. There were so many things—how we carry shame in our bodies, how we act upon that shame, the way that shame acts upon us—that I thought she expressed with such clarity. Totally. And I think it’s very much about the nature of memory itself. One of my fascinations is how we make sense of memory, how the past is fictionalised in our minds through constant reconstruction. That’s the work of therapy, and the adjacent work of memoir : to reconstruct, to translate a specific experience in a way that becomes meaningful or shareable. Here, Ernaux is playing with how memory works on the page. She comes at this experience again and again from slightly different angles. Occasionally you come back to the writer at her desk working it all out. So it feels like an interrogation of the past. “The biggest artifice of memoir as a genre is that there is an ending” It also made me think about how the events that were happening in the 1950s were still so relatable all this time later. For all the progress we’ve made in terms of feminism, for all that it feels like we are living in a sex-positive moment, there is work still to do, and a vast gap between the idea of liberation and being liberated to act on your sense of sexuality or to embody your sense of sexuality fully. So it was interesting that it doesn’t feel dated, and so many of her emotional responses still feel so present today. This book really connected with me as an interrogation of shame. My own book, Amphibian , began life as a work of nonfiction. It was my journey to understand how I ended up feeling I was doing something wrong when I acted upon my sexuality. I wanted to know where that shame came from, how it became connected to my sense of desire, and how to dismantle it. All these writers, in different ways, are working towards that too. I was chatting to people about what I was working on, about formative sexual experiences, when we first felt shame, and people would share their stories with me. They’d embark on an amazing beautiful story, then they would be like: Wow, I’ve never told anyone this before. So it became clear to me that I needed to expand the book beyond what my own experience could encompass. I started by fictionalising some of these stories—changing all the details, so they wouldn’t be clear even to the person who shared the experience with me. One turned into a short story, which is where I found my protagonist Sissy, and I started to wonder: what sort of girl did this happen to, who was she, how did she know to do that? Those questions led me into fiction, the characters led me into their stories, and it grew from there. Later in the writing process, and quite accidentally, it took on fabulous elements. Sissy undergoes an unexpected and visceral transformation, a metaphor for the uncharted physical terrain that we’re embarking on as young people, where your body is radically changing in ways that aren’t explained to you. So that’s where the magical realist elements weave their way into the story, and by then it had really departed from my life."