The title of this says it best, it is a girl’s story, about being a young girl, as it begins, and then a young woman as time passes, and as more time passes, it is a glimpse at the life that she’s lived, and everything that has happened in between. The mistakes made, the dreams she has, or had and were crushed, the way life changes as time passes. The memories. A Girl’s Story is Annie Ernaux’s memoir about her teenage years and, in particular, of the summer of 1958, spent working as a holiday camp instructor in Normandy. That summer included the first night she had sex. However, the whole summer was a more complex, unpleasant experience which had repercussions for years. After Ernaux details the events of that summer, she follows up with an account of the mental troubles created by that traumatic experience, including her fight with bulimia.

The main event of the book, losing her virginity at a summer camp in an almost forced manner, is not a climatic, spectacular moment. What really shines is Ernaux’s remarkable memory, her near perfect recollection of events and people. The narration on this topic sometimes seems detached and academical: “Her submission is not to him but to an indisputable, universal law, that of a savagery in the male to which she would have had to be subjected, sooner or later. That this law is brutal and dirty is just the way things are.” However, the writing also shows a kind of numbing, out of body disconnect of the mind as a defense mechanism, for instance: “I think I have come as close as possible to the reality of it, which was neither horror nor shame, only an obedience to what was happening, the lack of meaning in the things that happened.”

Shifting between ‘she’ and ‘I’, used to refer to her past and current self, respectively, along with photos as an attempt to access memories of a different, younger self, there is no secure unification of who the narrator was and who she, as author, is at the time of writing. This style of writing introduces the ideas of fragmented selves separated through time and history, where even memory is unreliable.

Her prose really transported me into the story and I found my heart physically hurting because it was told in such a realistic and present way that it felt like it was happening to me instead of her. “On this gray November Sunday in 2014, I watch the girl who was me watch him turn his back on her in front of all the others, the first man with whom she has ever been naked, who took pleasure in her body all night long. There is not a thought in her head, nothing inside but the memory of their two bodies, their gestures, and what was accomplished-whether she wanted it or not. She is seized by the panic of loss and a sense of abandonment that cannot be justified.” While her writing may seem detached and almost emotionless, Ernaux somehow manages to convey every ounce of emotion that her past self was feeling.

At one point in the story, Ernaux claims she wants to “make a literary being of myself, someone who lives as if her experiences were to be written down someday.” This philosophy is at the heart of Ernaux’s writing. A philosophy that tries to give meaning to everyday experiences that simply happen and unfold in real time. A way to bridge the gulf between what happened and how we remember it with the passing of time.