A Girl's Story

The "girl" of the title is Ernaux herself, at age 18, marked by her bookishness for a life outside the working class in which she was raised. And the story is, in essence, that of a single moment and its aftermath: an ambiguous encounter with a slightly older man, forced and then forgotten by him but altering her life forever. As in The Years, she holds her own past self at arm's length—who is this "I" who once was me, she asks again—but for all the distance she places between herself, now in her seventies, and this girl, the connection between them, along with the ruthless honesty of her self-investigation, give this little book an intensity beyond anything contained in The Years.