While I haven't had the opportunity to dive into this book yet, its unique premise and compelling subject matter caught my attention. I look forward to exploring it in the future and plan to seek out more works by this author. The thoughtful reviews from other readers, combined with the intriguing synopsis and critical acclaim, have reinforced my interest in making time for this potentially enlightening read that promises to expand my understanding of the topic.

"I started to make a literary being of myself, someone who lives as if her experiences were to be written down someday.”
Not my favorite Ernaux but still so beautifully written and unique. The queen of memoir. Introspective and unsettling in its honesty.

"A Girl's Story" is a poignant memoir by Annie Ernaux that takes the reader on a journey through the author's life as a young woman growing up in a small French town in the 1950s. The book is a beautiful and powerful exploration of memory, identity, and the struggles of a young woman to find her place in the world.

Ernaux's writing style is simple and direct, which allows the reader to focus on the emotional depth of the story. She vividly describes her experiences growing up in a working-class family and the challenges she faced as a young woman trying to break free from the expectations of her social class and gender.

One of the strengths of "A Girl's Story" is its honesty. Ernaux does not shy away from describing the difficult moments in her life, including her struggles with mental health and her conflicted feelings about her own sexuality. This vulnerability makes the book all the more powerful and relatable.

Thank you for the advanced audiobook. I love Annie Ernaux's writing and this was my first time experiencing the audiobook version of one of her titles. All of Ernaux's writings are part of her life being her life's work. The narrator captures Ernaux's direct way stating the facts of her life while adding in emotion when necessary. Ernaux doesn't make apologies about her behavior in her writing. This was a great narration and another wonderful piece from Ernaux.

Ernaux looks back on her youth, specifically relating her 18th year and her yearning for adulthood. A no -holds- barred look at memory and how it shapes us and also how we come to know ourselves. As we all reside now in the “Me Too” era, I think young women may read this memoir with shock and awe.

Recommended

Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for allowing me to listen to an ARC of A Girl's Story.

Before Annie Ernaux won the Nobel Prize for Literature, I had never heard of her. I live part-time in France
so there really is no excuse. So when given the opportunity to read this book, I jumped at it.
There is no way to describe Ernaux's powerful writing. I believe this book was written about 50 years after the events that she is describing. These are stories about her but it's not exactly a memoir. It's more of a social commentary--of who she was and the times she lived in, and how that impacted what she did or didn't do.
Ernaux's writing is strong. She never minces words. As a woman I found myself nodding my head in agreement when she commented on some action she took and how society had influenced her.

The main story is about her summer at a camp and the aftermath. The affair she had with a boy and how different she felt with students her own age in school. She wanted to fit in but she didn't want to fit in. Since she was writing as an adult looking backward, she could lovingly judge herself. although love is not the right word. She is not detached from what happens to girls and women but she can write about significant episodes with a perspective that is inspiring for a writer such as me.

This is a wonderful book. Not just a well-written book but a look back on the 50s in France by a brilliant observer.. I'm so glad to know of her and I'm already into my next book of hers.

This is the first Annie Ernaux book I've read, and I did so in the wake of her winning the 2022 Nobel Prize for Literature. Perhaps because of the high expectations I had for a Nobel Prize winner, I was a bit underwhelmed by "A Girl's Story," and I'm not entirely sure why. Maybe because autofiction isn't one of my favorite genres, or because of the painful subject matter (a sexual assault and its mental and physical fallout), or because I would have preferred to read this rather than listen to the audiobook, since I wasn't crazy about the narrator. I certainly admire Ernaux's ability to interrogate her past and "the girl of 1958” with clear eyed and almost brutal honesty, and I will try more of her books.

Thank you to NetGalley and Dreamscape Media for providing me with an ARC audiobook of this title in exchange for my honest review.

I stopped at 40%. The narrator was okay, nothing spectacular, good pronounciation of French. The story meandered, and as a translated work, there was still quite a bit of French phrases untranslated.

Thank you NetGalley and Dreamscape Media for accepting my request to audibly read and review A Girl's Story.

Author: Annie Ernaux; Alison L. Strayer
Published: 04/21/20
Narrator: Tavia Gilbert
Genre: Biographies & Memoirs

This is tricky. In the summer of 1958, Annie dreamed of marriage. Fifty years later, she tells the story of the night that formed her life. The standards for women were defined by their first intimate moment or was it? Contraception? Abortion? Kiss and telling? Egads.

A Girl's Story is about all those things and more. Was she conditioned to be naive? Are girls today? She spells out, fifty years later, how she felt and how she was treated. She wants in the most eloquent, yet simple ways for life to go as she was taught.

He plans to leave in the morning, will say goodbye. She gets up early fearful she has missed him. I felt incredibly sorry for her.

This is not for everyone. It's complicated, a thinker, and dark. It's for smart people. Like fine wine, best in little sips. It's not mass market. Many times, I would listen and let the scene resonate.

I can't remember if there was profanity. I didn't write it down.

Mémoire de fille / A Girl's Story
by Annie Ernaux
Book Shelves: 2022, audio, bios-memoirs, france, netgalley, read, women-centered
Format AUDIOBOOK Edition
October 30, 2022 – Finished Reading

Review I have become a big fan of Annie Ernaux and I am enjoying her unique and talented style of writing. I would like to thank the publisher, author, narrator, and NetGalley for this ARC in exchange for my honest review.

In this short novel: Mémoire de fille (A Girl's Story), Ernaux's writing is superb. However, this short memoir wasn't always easy for me to read because of the subject matter and you learn it's difficult very quickly in the first chapter. It's a story about Ernaux's life in 1958 as an 18 year old, and how obsessed, transfixed, and naive she was (even more than most 18 yr. old's even in 1958), during her affair with an older, married man, while working at a holiday camp in Normandy.

It's HOW Ernaux tells this story that makes it so worth reading, although painful, compelling, and almost difficult to read. It is graphically sexual, which might turn some people off to the heterosexual affair, between an 18 year old virgin and this older married man. I was able to go past my dismay and sadness for Ernaux in order to finish it, because she writes so honestly. It's also a clever writing concept of how Ernaux only wrote a page a day (60 years later) as if it were her daily diary from her 18th year. It works! (Reminds me of method acting.)

I read this on Audiobook and thank my Libby library app for the audio. Last but not least, the translator/narrator, Alison L. Strayer, was tres magnifique!

Thank you Net Galley for an audio ARC of A Girl's Story by Anne Ernaux. What a lovely Memoir. To me this is about an incident in youth affecting the life of the victim. But a journey through recovery and rebirth!

Artists are in search of truth. And yet, even with many writers keeping this in mind, it is tempting to interpret one's personal experience in a flattering or apologizing light. It's particularly challenging to keep an observant eye when writing autobiographical books. The 2022 Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to Annie Ernaux "for the courage and clinical acuity with which she uncovers the roots, estrangements, and collective restraints of personal memory." This perfectly explains what we find in Ernoux's prose, which makes it unique. The qualities praised by the Nobel committee are evident in the book "A girl's story." Chapeau bas, Madame Ernaux!

This is an autobiographical story of a girl, Annie, who leaves her parent's home in the summer of 1958 to work at a summer camp. The sense of freedom is overwhelming. She's a tall, shy girl who loves to read and watch obscure art movies like "Canal" from an Eastern Europe block country. Coming from a small village, she hasn't experienced taking a bath in a tub or showering, and now she's surrounded by girls who seem worldly, articulated, and so pretty. But, for the first time, she feels noticed -  she becomes an object of an older man's sexual interest. Satisfied, he quickly leaves her without explanation. The girl is devastated. It's not love; it's the feeling of being abandoned, left without a master, with no idea what to do next. What could she do to win him back?

A similar situation would be simply condemned in our world of the #metoo movement. However, Ernaux neither judges nor explains – she merely looks at that young girl, after 50 years, from the perspective of older herself, noting that not just the facts are essential. It’s even more important what we do with them.

It's a fascinating, beautiful book: narrative to the point of being a scientific exploration of a case and, simultaneously, incredibly poetic. Not often do we see such depth and intelligence in describing personal experiences in literature. With French songs of Dalida and Jean-Luc Godard's movies in the background, with the Algerian war in the news, Annie goes through two years of her young life – and the older Annie observes her after 50 years. She is not just a product of the author's memory or a lesson in dealing with the past.

The author mentions Roger Vadim's film "And God Created Woman."  After reading "A Girl's Story," I see that a young  Annie Duchesne created Annie Ernaux.

My first encounter with Ernaux was last year, when I read Happening. While I didn't particularly enjoy that volume, I was determined to try again after Ernaux won the Nobel Prize, and I'm so glad I did. A Girl's Story is a tough, raw account of Ernaux's experiences as a young girl in a summer camp in the 50s, and later follows her as those experiences shapes moments of her life, rather she was aware of it at the time or not. Ernaux has an obvious understanding of the human psyche that, as a writer, I am seething with jealously over---her accounts were untainted and truthful while at the same time coated in all the best literature has to offer, with a grip in words and an assurance many strife, and fail, to reproduce. She talks about female sexuality, politics, eating disorders, family and many other topics while never losing her integrity. The narrator of the audiobook also did a fantastic job portraying this story.

I feel so ungrateful, having been given an advance (audio) copy of "A Girl's Story" because ... I didn't like it. And also because the author received the Nobel Prize days ago. I must be honest: this book struck me as having too much (for me) of the philosophizing that some French authors have been apt to do in their fiction. "A Girl's Story" has lots of pondering about time, identity, responsibility, women's roles with men, and re-inhabiting our younger self. And sex. Yes, many pages philosophizing about sex. All of which are very important to think about, but in this book the reader is liable to lose interest early on.
There is basically one event in this book, the author's first sexual experience at age 18. She was wanting to lose her virginity and had a very romanticized, gauzy concept about what sex would be like as almost all of us do, but, it didn't go well. The guy is a neanderthal and after one more night with Annie, he dumps her, and she spends decades analyzing all permutations of the event. In middle/old age she looks for him when she is in places where he might show up. I wasn't bothered about the level of Annie's preoccupation. I was bothered that the writing felt so detached, intellectual, analytical.
I did, however, find an antidote for my disappointment in an audio version of Ernaux's "Happening" which formed the basis for the excellent film of the same name. It also tells the story of a sexual experience that the author had when 22, getting pregnant in the early 1960's in France when abortion was a felony for the patient and the doctor and anyone who helped the patient find the doctor. Or maybe even drove her to the doctor. The writing is vivid, and Ernaux is very skilled (Nobel Prize) in conveying the protagonist's phases of denial, dissociation, rage, loneliness, terror, pain, and then relief. It is a short book as is "A Girl's Story" and there is not a wasted word in it. Now I plan to check out more of Ernaux's writing. And I don't want Alison L. Strayer to think I'm ungrateful for the opportunity to listen to this ARC.

Fine, I admit! I'm one of those people who didn't even know Annie Ernaux's name before Nobel Prize announcement. I think I take less interest in memoirs and biographies. I really need to be interested in that person before I would pick up his/her memoir. I spend my days analyzing people and how their minds work, so I don't want to do so much of that while reading as well.

I thought A Girl's Story would be a good introduction to Annie Ernaux. You can learn a lot from pre-teen and teenage years of a person, especially how much they are exposed to certain social "norms" or rules. We are product of our childhood's ego. Many that we internalized come from that period. Now that I know bit more about that stage of Annie Ernaux, I will pick other parts where she was talking about her later years.

If you are newbie like me, I think this a great start. You have a chance to experience her unapologetic and to the point writing in addition to her developing personality. I really liked her tone and no BS attitude.