Girl, A Novel

From the acclaimed author of Little Dancer Aged Fourteen, a deeply personal and insightful account of being a girl, woman, and mother in a world that sees the feminine as less than.Born in 1959 to a middle-class family, Laurence Barraqu grows up with her sister in the northern city of Rouen. Her father is a doctor, her mother a housewife. She understands from an early age, by way of language and her parents example, that a girls place in life is inferior to a boys: Asked for the 1964 census whether he has any children, her father promptly responds, No. I have two daughters. When Laurence eventually becomes a mother herself in the nineties, she grapples with the question of what it means to be a girl, to have a girl, and what lessons she should try to pass down or undo.Masterful in her analysis of the subtle and obvious ways women are undermined by a sexist society, Camille Laurens lays out her...