A Girl’s Story
Annie Ernaux
“She is dazzled by her freedom, its dizzying expanse. She is earning money for the first time and buys whatever strikes her fancy, pastries, red Email Diamant toothpaste. There is nothing she wants more than to live this way, always—to dance, laugh, horse about, sing lewd songs, flirt.
She floats in the lightness of being cut loose from her mother’s watchful gaze.” p. 58
“And so I organized a fondue party to celebrate his departure the following day, and that the blonde, on leave in Caen, would not be there.
The girl in the first image I see hovers excitedly with others around a cauldron bubbling on a hot plate. I imagine her with her stomach in knots and madly hoping, maybe even praying, that her hour of glory has come.” p. 71
“First I turned it loose on my body. Starting in January, at the residence, I ceased to ingest anything but a bowl of coffee and milk in the morning, and a single slice of meat served at lunch every day except Friday, when boiled fish was served, and then soup in the evening, followed by a stewed or fresh apple.” p. 102
“I replaced the previous months’ acute and always too-short-lived pleasure of gorging myself on buttered bread and fried potatoes with that of willful deprivation.” p. 102
“Every refectory meal becomes an adventure from which I emerge with only a distant sense of having eaten, or even hungrier than before, and always triumphant, having foisted on my neighbor my allotted portion of Laughing Cow cheese.” p. 103
“In my kingdom of sugar-filled childhood, every sorrow, every slap my mother let fly ended in the comfort of a biscuit tin or a jar of sweets. I don’t know what the girl is thinking when suddenly she loses all control of her desire and lunges (so I imagine) at the cheese and caramels and the madeleines for individual sale to customers. Or maybe she does not think at all. It is a first scene of gluttony, when the conscious mind looks on powerless as frenzied hands catch and stuff a frenzied mouth with food it scarcely chews, food it engulfs for the pleasure of a body become a bottomless pit.” p. 104
