Annie Ernaux and A Girl's Story

Annie Ernaux’s work shares a strong connective tissue with Frida Kahlo’s self-portraits.  Both specialize in self-autopsy through an objective and often disturbing lens.  Their work is womanist and revealing, evocative and vibrant.

In her latest work, A Girl’s Story (Seven Stories Press, 2020), Ernaux dissects an event that occurred when she was an eighteen year-old camp counselor and by her own admission, still a child.  She becomes almost a third party observer to a romantic dalliance that quickly becomes a rape.  She is a virgin at the time, and she subscribes to the idea that every first penetration is an act of violence.  In this case, the boy in question forces himself on her, and only later does she discover that he had no intention of having a relationship with her after their encounter.  She is left to find her way back from the shame and disappointment of the event and forge an identity that moves beyond the victim trope.

Ernaux captures so well the confusion of those teenage years in a time of sexual and gender oppression:  1958.  The sexual revolution was a decade away, and girls who engaged in this kind of behavior at that time, even if unwilling participants, had their reputations tarnished.  For boys, it was considered experience; for girls, it was devastating.  Ernaux at first cannot understand his rejection of her.  She thinks about him constantly, even tries to bend her strands of memory to wrap around the fantasy that there is some kind of connection between them post-assault.  She suffers no physical injury beyond the torn hymen, but the psychic impact follows her all her life.  The act changes her on a molecular level, and causes an eruption of questioning and self-analysis.  Only now, at 79 years of age, can she write about it and find the distance to be objective and thorough in her examination.

This book is just one more work in Ernaux’s autoethnography—in her other books she has addressed her parents’ lives, her marriage, her abortion, Alzheimer’s disease and her breast cancer.  All are written in an extremely close, first person point of view but with a clarity and conciseness that compares to examining oneself through a microscope.  Sometimes, this requires her to adopt a third person point of view, as she did throughout her last book, The Years (Seven Stories Press, 2017).  She utilizes that point of view occasionally in this book, jumping back and forth between first and third person.  She is the girl in the situation, the aging woman who remembers, and an objective observer of the event and its aftermath.  It all melds together for a complete and layered study.

Annie Ernaux’s writing is intense, provocative and concise, a style of prose poetry that stuns in its imaginative clarity.  A Girl’s Story only adds to her evocative body of work.  It is a beautiful and wrenching depiction of the end of childhood, and the events that shape whatever comes after.