About the work
“Erinnerung eines Mädchens” (original title “Mémoire de fille”, in English “A Girl’s Story”) is an autobiographical text by the French writer Annie Ernaux, published by Gallimard in April 2016; Sonja Finck’s German translation followed from Suhrkamp in 2018. More than five decades after the events, Ernaux reconstructs a summer of her youth with the help of photographs and letters. The text has been staged several times, including in 2021 at the Residenztheater Munich, directed by Silvia Costa, and in 2022 at the Schaubühne Berlin in a version by Veronika Bachfischer, Sarah Kohm and Elisa Leroy, directed by Kohm with Bachfischer.
Plot
In the summer of 1958, 18-year-old Annie Duchesne works as a counsellor at a holiday camp in Normandy. There she has her first sexual encounter with the head counsellor H., which leaves her deeply shaken; afterwards the other counsellors mock and shun her. Ernaux traces how shame and physical after-effects shape the following years, until the young woman begins studying education. Throughout, the text moves back and forth between “the girl of 1958” and the writer of today.
Cultural significance
In France and in the German-language press the book was widely praised as an unsparing examination of shame and sexual violence. In a France Culture documentary in 2020, Ernaux explicitly described the experience as rape. She received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2022; in 2026 Judith Godrèche’s film adaptation “A Girl’s Story” screened at Cannes in the Un Certain Regard section.