Join Il Circolo Bookclub – Mondo Nuovo, our Italian book club, for an online discussion of “Memoria di ragazza” by Annie Ernaux, with Olga Campofreda.
Summer 1958. Away from her family for the first time, working as a youth leader at a summer camp, an eighteen-year-old girl discovers herself: love, sex, the judgement of others, the struggles of youth, and the thirst for freedom.
Between the light of the photographs from that time and the darkness of repressed memories, Annie Ernaux relives the transitional age that transformed her into a woman and a writer, reflecting on the thoughts, expectations and hesitations (not to mention the eating disorders and anxieties about fertility) of the ‘girl of ’58’.
In pages brimming with anxieties and secret sorrows, overflowing with bursts of passion and songs – the ‘Esperanto of love’ – it is the shame of the past that gives rise to memory, revealing itself as an unexpected gift, an indispensable weapon in that ‘struggle with reality’ which lies at the heart of Ernaux’s literary endeavour.
*Memoir of a Girl*, a powerful reflection on writing and on a crucial phase of life, is the forbidden and unmentionable book that the author has pursued throughout her life.
Non-members are very welcome to register below.
