Stories from the author’s life, based on her actual journals. Not in chronological order. Loving and loosing a cat (poignant to us since we recently lost our nineteen-year-old cat). Awkward interactions with boys. Obsessing over some of them, never speaking to friends again over others, and then some awful moments- being groped on public transit by a stranger, assaulted after a party at someone’s house- that she never tells anyone about (until now I suppose). One strange single-page snippet about a girl she sits next to in band who has a strange patch of skin on her hand- and an obviously made-up story to explain it. Was it a burn from an accident? eczema? there’s no resolution to that one. How she tries to learn skiing, always finding it difficult, but everyone else seems to pick up the skill so easily. Her anxiety to develop breasts but then chagrin at the sometimes-unwanted attention they bring. Always feeling cold and this weird coin-pay heating system that sound totally archaic and aggravating, in places where she lived in London, as a university student. There’s a lot more, but not much else stuck out in my memory after completing the book.
Translated from French by Montana Kane. Borrowed from the public library.