A Girl's Story

In this work, Annie Ernaux revisits the summer of 1958, her first away from home, when she worked as a holiday camp instructor in Normandy, and recounts the first night she spent with a man. When he moves on, she realizes she has submitted her will to his and finds that she is a slave without a master. Now, sixty years later, she realizes she can obliterate the intervening years and return to consider this young woman whom she wanted to forget completely.