A review by cecilie_who_reads
Pigen fra '58 by Annie Ernaux

medium-paced

5.0

Fish out of water - to be out of a very restricted environment for the first time and taking your cues from the cool kids, you think, as to how to do cool, normal, sexy, grown-up. The girl from '58 is the writer's own self from that year - barely remembered, estranged from the mature author, dug out from letters, diaries, pictures. She goes as the youngest childcarer or pedagogue to a summercamp, to earn money and experience. 
Coming from a boy-less Catholic School, the 17-year-old "girl from '58" is so deceived, and no one think of her as some one who they should be teaching to stand up for herself or what to put up with or how to have fun. Swept up and used on the first night away by a 22-year-old head-pedagogue, she invests all her feelings in what she believes belongs together with kisses and sex, and falls in love with that *hole leader, some five years older than her, who has no respect for such a 'dumb' little girl. That whole summer she goes along with this lesson and confuses the desire of worthless young men with respect or even sympathy. She is the despised laughing stock of her 'colleagues'. 
It severely affects the direction she takes with her life afterwards. Thank God for her that what she is really good at is being a writer. But without that summer, she may have had more ways of functioning, more choice.  :
 
One would want young people to read this before they set out to let classmates and friends define the world for them - one would also want them not to read it - it is so harsh.
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