A Girl's Story by Annie Ernaux Review: When “She” and “I” Are Not Two Voices

Part of: The Deep Reader

All articles on Annie Ernaux

When Ernaux’s reconstruction reaches the girl’s arrival at the summer camp at S, she writes, “This time she entered.” The sentence establishes the book's governing division: the later writer speaks as “I,” while the eighteen-year-old Annie Duchesne of 1958 becomes “she.” More than half a century stands between them, and the pronouns keep that distance visible.

She describes this decision as “certainly the most adventurous” way to proceed. It prevents the mature author from pretending that the girl already possessed her later knowledge and lets Ernaux judge her former conduct from an impersonal distance. Memory supplies the same body while judgment keeps changing its owner.

The difficulty is more fully realized than the solution. Throughout A Girl's Story, “she” identifies the younger Ernaux without giving her a sufficiently distinct voice, rhythm of thought, or mode of perception, while the older narrator continues to interpret both sides of the division. What looks like a doubled perspective often amounts to one intelligence changing its grammatical position.

The Book Explains the Girl Before She Appears

The first chapter gives away the completed interpretation before Annie Duchesne reaches camp. In an abstract overture, certain beings are overwhelmed by an “Other,” surrender their will to a “Master,” endure abandonment, remake themselves to recover his attention, then gradually leave him behind. The entire trajectory is present: subjection, obsession, self-improvement, escape. Even the central sexual ambiguity receives an early verdict—“There is no submission, no consent”—before the narrative has shown what the girl wanted, understood, feared, or believed she owed the man.

The framing assigns the event a vocabulary and a destination. When the camp episode later unfolds, its particulars often illustrate a theory already installed above them: H possesses knowledge and authority; the girl obeys; rejection deepens her submission; transformation eventually carries her beyond him. The prologue has classified these relations in advance, leaving the scene little room to alter them.

The copular verdicts—“She is all desire and pride,” “She has no defined self,” and “She is lost—a rag-doll girl”—fix the girl before the syntax can discover a consciousness; her need for other male bodies is later compressed into “the consolatory erection.” The problem is not plain vocabulary but sequence: proposition, example, and explanation follow so obediently that the explanation often underlines what the proposition has already declared.

“She” Changes the Grammar More Than the Mind

Ernaux openly concedes that she cannot retrieve the girl's language. She possesses images, letters, diaries, later bodily memories, and an enormous archive of social detail, but no recording of the voice that spoke in 1958. At one point, after the first rejection by H, she declares herself “incapable of entering the mind of the girl of S” and restricts herself to gestures, actions, and remembered words.

A fictional teenage voice would violate the documentary restraint Ernaux has chosen. The third-person position can still change what may be known, how perception is arranged, or how judgment is earned. Across long stretches, all three remain under the older narrator's control.

That restriction could have generated a radical form. The girl might have remained partly opaque, forcing the older woman to build a consciousness from incompatible traces. Instead, the narration repeatedly moves from confessed ignorance to confident psychological assignment. Ernaux cannot know what the girl thought, then tells us what she desired more than anything; cannot recover her language, then supplies categorical accounts of her pride, denial, freedom, and dignity. The hesitation changes the certainty level of individual sentences, although it rarely changes who controls the interpretation.

The surviving letters make the weakness clearer because they briefly accomplish what the pronouns do not. Their exclamations, fashionable foreign tags, grand talk of youth and emancipation, quotations from recent reading, and jubilant claim to be “amoral and cynical” form a historically specific self-performance. In the letters, the girl sounds unlike the woman studying her. Her borrowed phrases are evidence of character: an intelligent provincial adolescent trying on modernity through books and slogans. Once the letter closes, “she” returns to the mature narrator's sociological and psychological vocabulary.

“She” interrupts a fraudulent continuity between youth and retrospection, separating the two selves while leaving interpretation under one governing voice.

Soap, Chocolate, Whiskey, and a Bolted Door

The book is most convincing when Ernaux lets an object retain its difficulty. During the first night with H, a bar of soap, hazelnut milk chocolate from her parents' store, and his request that she buy whiskey coexist with pain, obedience, social distance, and the absurd resumption of ordinary talk. After their later night together, his bolted door records rejection more efficiently than a diagnosis could. An intimate letter pinned to a public noticeboard shows how the group turns a private confession into permission to humiliate her. On her mirror, “Long live whores” appears in large red letters written with her toothpaste; the girl's joking response—“Is it the plural that bothers you?”—shows her treating the insult as false rather than accepting its shame.

Chocolate comes from the family world the girl believes she has escaped; whiskey belongs to a world of male experience and money that she has not entered. The posted letter turns private language into a communal spectacle, and a door reduces an imagined love affair to a man choosing silence.

That exactness weakens when the narrator raises a local humiliation into a ready-made universal verdict: the girl surrounded by laughing counselors becomes every woman, everywhere, facing men prepared to stone her. Male ridicule and female acquiescence sustain the camp's sexual order. The leap to “time immemorial” spends that precise social evidence on a universal image. The sentence grows larger while the understanding grows thinner.

“My Period Stopped in October”

The book's most substantial psychological evidence lies in the two years after the summer. The girl's period stops for two years. Her appetite passes from pleasure to fasting and bingeing; she bleaches her hair, tries to manufacture an invulnerable femininity, and reorganizes her studies around becoming worthy of H. Philosophy then condemns the conduct she had experienced as freedom, furnishing a shame that she did not feel during the event. She fails at teacher training; in London she shoplifts and finds an unstable reprieve; at university she finds intellectual purpose, her period returns, and she begins moving toward writing.

A sexual experience changes meaning as the institutions around the girl change: Catholic school, philosophy classroom, medical office, teacher-training college, foreign household, university. The bare sentence “My period stopped in October” marks a boundary the pronoun scheme could never supply. It records a bodily fact before offering any theory of its cause.

Ernaux sometimes closes this uncertainty too quickly, proposing causal lines among H, amenorrhea, bulimia, ambition, failure, and authorship before withdrawing or qualifying them. Those qualifications are honest; they also reveal how often the book has already suggested the satisfying pattern it claims it cannot prove. The sequence is richer while its causes remain unstable; the later idea that injury prepared a literary vocation makes it tidier and less convincing.

Consent Remains Unsettled

The first night resists any clean retrospective label. The girl wants to lose her virginity and later seeks H again. During the encounter she is frightened, physically hurt, ignorant of what will happen next, and unable to imagine leaving. Ernaux writes, “There is no difference between what she does and what happens to her,” then admits that she cannot locate the moment at which the girl “inwardly consents.” Desire, obedience, bewilderment, and unequal knowledge occupy the same event.

Decades later, after recounting the girl's encounter with Simone de Beauvoir's claim that first penetration is always rape, Ernaux declines to settle the matter. A retrospective verdict could name the violence and inequality of H's conduct while erasing the girl's remembered desire; her old romantic story preserves desire while concealing how little practical agency she possessed. Neither account absorbs the whole experience.

The evidence from 1958 and the judgment formed afterward remain in conflict, giving the temporal division the substance the pronouns alone lack. The older woman can neither endorse the girl’s understanding nor replace it without remainder. Ernaux dreams of a sentence capable of holding 1958 and 2014 together. Although the book never discovers that new syntax, these passages keep the two incompatible understandings in view without pretending that either can absorb the other.

“Impossible to Stop Here”

“It seems to me that I have finally freed the girl of ’58,” Ernaux writes at the end of the camp section, followed by: “she is me and I am her.” The next sentence refuses closure: “Impossible to stop here.” The book must continue through the bodily damage, the mistaken vocation, London, university, and the first attempt at a novel.

If the girl still has to be followed for two more years, writing the camp cannot yet have established what freedom consists of. Publication may end secrecy; exact reconstruction may restore experiences excluded from the respectable adult identity. Neither act proves that the former self has been integrated into the present one or freed from the narrator's judgments and defenses.

Ernaux imagines the whole story as a perilous passage toward the harbor of writing, with suffering redeemed by what the future author makes of it, then calls this an unprovable, reassuring belief. On the final page, she writes that even the thing pursued in writing the book has dissolved. The self-correction prevents A Girl's Story from settling into the simple emancipation story invited by its earlier gestures toward closure.

Ernaux names the distance between the writer and the girl throughout the book, and some passages make that distance painful. A pronoun, however, cannot perform the work of a second consciousness. The “she” of 1958 comes nearest to life in her letters, her mistaken words, her body's disorders, and the objects that refuse the adult narrator's explanations. Whenever the older “I” lets those traces resist her, the result is exact and disturbing; whenever she announces their meaning, the girl recedes behind the method designed to recover her.