‘I too wanted to forget that girl. Really forget her, that is, stop yearning to write about her. Stop thinking that I have to write about this girl and her desire and madness, her idiocy and pride, her hunger and her blood that ceased to flow. I have never managed to do so.’ In A Girl’s Story, her latest book, Annie Ernaux recalls the summer of 1958, when she worked as a camp instructor in Normandy, and recounts the first night she spent with a man. When he leaves, she realizes she has submitted her will to him and discovers that she is a slave without a master. Now, sixty years later, she finds that she can erase the intervening years and return to thinking about this girl she wanted to completely forget. In the written time of A Girl’s Story, which brings to the surface the indelible memories of that summer, Ernaux discovers that this was the vital, violent, and painful origin of her writing, built from shame, violence, and betrayal.