Thank you @fitzcarraldoeditions for gifting me an ARC of Annie Ernaux’s latest autobiographic piece of work to review! Those of you who know my reading tastes will know that non fiction scares me, but Ernaux is the only author whose work I will pick up without hesitation, knowing it’s all non fiction.

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I don’t know an author who chooses their words as carefully as Ernaux. You can sense that every word, every phrase, every sentence has been meticulously chosen to represent that episode in her life as accurately and honestly as possible. And obviously, as Ernaux chooses each word with care, so must the translator take equal care. Alison L Strayer is more than up to the task. I feel like I can SENSE the effort she’s put into reproducing Ernaux’s thoughtful phrasing, even more so than with other translated works. Don’t ask me why, I just sense it!

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Ernaux isn’t interested in portraying a romanticised version of her life. She simply wants to lay bare what she lived and make some sense of it. But she also reminds us how our memories can play tricks on us, altering the way we remember certain episodes in our lives. Can we ever have a truly non-biased and accurate memory? How does time distort our perception of what happened 10, 20, 50 years ago?

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I realise now I’ve got quite far in my review without any mention of what she’s writing about... In A Girl’s Story Ernaux recounts her first night spent with a man and the events that unravel from that, including her experience with bulimia. As ever, it’s unflinchingly honest and I admire her for putting so much of her life down on paper, so that other people might realise they are not alone in their experiences.

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Somehow she makes the intensely personal seem universal. There is some of the juxtaposition between personal and political, but nowhere near as heavily as in The Years, nor is it as searingly intimate as Happening. It sits somewhere in the middle, and for that reason I haven’t rated it as highly as those two, but it is still an excellent piece of writing.