Memoirs of Girlhood

Thank you for choosing these memoirs of girlhood: five female coming-of-age stories. Why do you find it such a compelling subject?

I think we spend our lifetimes trying to make sense of it. These are our most formative years, the years when how we think—our very brain structure, according to neuroscience—is being shaped. During puberty, similarly to post-partum, our brains show radical changes.

So, we live with the repercussions of our girlhoods. It’s a time when you move from childhood, where things happen to you and there is a degree of passivity, to finding agency and becoming an actor in your own story, which is also why it makes such good material.

I found girlhood, personally, to be quite brutal in the intensity of it. I felt things incredibly deeply, and those feelings were often dismissed as transitory. You know: You’ll grow out of it. They weren’t given the weight that they deserve. Perhaps girls, specifically, are often told that what they feel and, more pertinently, what they experience during those early years somehow don’t count, that you haven’t yet entered ‘real life.’ It is a form of silencing, and the first time we learn not to speak up—to smile.

That’s why I wanted to write Amphibian—to dignify the experience of girlhood, and to say: What you feel matters and counts. We take those lessons with us into adulthood.

I find exploring that time very interesting, and these are other writers who have made sense of it for me and led the way. They’ve done the work of unravelling the knots we carry with us through life.

Your first book recommendation is Annie Ernaux’s A Girl’s Story. It elaborates on some of the points you made there, about moving beyond girlhood passivity.

I discovered Ernaux only recently and I’m so excited that there are now so many books for me to read. People kept recommending this to me, and you know how, when you sense something is going to be really important to you, you are almost resistant to it? So I kept putting off reading it. Then I found this beautiful edition from Fitzcarraldo and decided it was time. I do believe in books coming into your life just when you need them.

This book goes back to her time at summer camp in Normandy in 1958, and her first traumatic sexual experience that she had never made sense of. She returns to that event and its repercussions in her life over the years. What I loved about this book in particular was in the craft of it. She talks about herself as that girl in the third person. She carries the memories and repercussions, but that girl is almost a stranger to her. She’s trying to see her clear-sightedly on the page and return to her, but with the understanding that it is an impossible task to bridge the distance between her now and her then. She uses no tricks of the trade to make you feel like you are having a cohesive experience of the past; we’re involved in the process of remembering and misremembering with her. That makes it feel very real and very vital. There were so many things—how we carry shame in our bodies, how we act upon that shame, the way that shame acts upon us—that I thought she expressed with such clarity.

Ernaux tackles personal history, even the domestic, with an unflinching eye. It can be quite uncomfortable but I do think it’s very truthful as to how life itself is experienced.

Totally. And I think it’s very much about the nature of memory itself. One of my fascinations is how we make sense of memory, how the past is fictionalised in our minds through constant reconstruction. That’s the work of therapy, and the adjacent work of memoir: to reconstruct, to translate a specific experience in a way that becomes meaningful or shareable.

Here, Ernaux is playing with how memory works on the page. She comes at this experience again and again from slightly different angles. Occasionally you come back to the writer at her desk working it all out. So it feels like an interrogation of the past.

“The biggest artifice of memoir as a genre is that there is an ending”

It also made me think about how the events that were happening in the 1950s were still so relatable all this time later. For all the progress we’ve made in terms of feminism, for all that it feels like we are living in a sex-positive moment, there is work still to do, and a vast gap between the idea of liberation and being liberated to act on your sense of sexuality or to embody your sense of sexuality fully. So it was interesting that it doesn’t feel dated, and so many of her emotional responses still feel so present today. This book really connected with me as an interrogation of shame.

My own book, Amphibian, began life as a work of nonfiction. It was my journey to understand how I ended up feeling I was doing something wrong when I acted upon my sexuality. I wanted to know where that shame came from, how it became connected to my sense of desire, and how to dismantle it. All these writers, in different ways, are working towards that too.

How did the jump to fiction come about?

I was chatting to people about what I was working on, about formative sexual experiences, when we first felt shame, and people would share their stories with me. They’d embark on an amazing beautiful story, then they would be like: Wow, I’ve never told anyone this before. So it became clear to me that I needed to expand the book beyond what my own experience could encompass. I started by fictionalising some of these stories—changing all the details, so they wouldn’t be clear even to the person who shared the experience with me. One turned into a short story, which is where I found my protagonist Sissy, and I started to wonder: what sort of girl did this happen to, who was she, how did she know to do that? Those questions led me into fiction, the characters led me into their stories, and it grew from there. Later in the writing process, and quite accidentally, it took on fabulous elements. Sissy undergoes an unexpected and visceral transformation, a metaphor for the uncharted physical terrain that we’re embarking on as young people, where your body is radically changing in ways that aren’t explained to you. So that’s where the magical realist elements weave their way into the story, and by then it had really departed from my life.

It’s a great metaphor for our experiences as teenagers. Which perhaps leads us to your second book recommendation, T. Kira Madden’s memoir Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls. It’s an account of her coming of age in Boca Raton, Florida.

Yes, it’s a queer coming of age story about her experiences as a biracial woman. Her mother is Chinese-Hawaiian and her father Jewish. Her heritage is quite complicated, and she’s experiencing girlhood from quite a privileged world, but you can’t pin it down. Because while there is privilege, both her parents suffer from addiction and are absent in different ways—emotionally absent, physically absent—through drug use. Madden is an only child navigating this traumatic landscape alone and then later finding a lifeline in her friends, the titular fatherless girls.

As a writer, she has an amazing capacity to remember detail, lines that people have said, details that make you feel that you are there in her body, experiencing these things with her. And there’s an earnestness, an enormous desire to be loved. That desire is weaponised against her by the “glittering viciousness” of the other girls she hangs out with and by predatory men. It’s impossible to read it and not connect with her.

The book defies being tied up neatly with a bow, and that’s one of the reasons I loved it so much. Memoir often takes one thread, views experience through a singular lens, and anything that doesn’t apply falls by the wayside. It comes around to a sense of closure, a sense of emotional landing or of having arrived somewhere… The biggest artifice of memoir as a genre is that there is an ending. Because the lives of the memoirists don’t stop dead at the end of the book, they continue to live and learn and grow.

What T. Kira Madden does is really resist that arc that commercial memoir so often imposes on a story. That made it, to me, piercingly relatable. It isn’t an easy message: That we grow up and have experiences good and bad, hurtful and delightful. But she manages to capture that messiness of girlhood.

It’s structured like a series of vignettes, or interconnected essays. And the fragmentary nature of the book, I think, reflects how we remember our childhoods. We don’t have in-between bits, only flashbulb moments that are meaningful, with which we try to piece together a story. In retrospect, as adults, we are constantly projecting plot points onto our pasts to make sense of our experiences. Here, she is resisting the urge to fill in those gaps for you. I think that’s what I learned from her as a memoirist: You don’t have to write what you don’t know. You don’t have to speculate or help the reader understand. You can give them these beautiful, embodied moments of memory and they will string it together the way we all do with our own pasts.

Hilary Mantel said that writers should “give your reader credit for being as smart as you at least.”

I love that. And also: Trust in yourself as a writer that you have given them what you need to. I have a tendency to over-explain, overwrite. So when a writer comes at the page and their craft with economy and precision, I’m in awe.

Melissa Febos’s Girlhood is a collection of essays about her experiences coming of age as a woman. Would you talk us through it, and why you recommend it?

I’m so in love with this book. Reading Melissa Febos is a masterclass in essay writing. This felt like kin to my own book, although I’m sure lots of people have read this and felt it a kindred spirit to their own work.

Febos is trying to make sense of what it means to be in our bodies as women as we grow up. She starts from her earliest childhood memories—young and rampaging through the woods, with a delight in the physical that I think we can all remember from childhood, before it became more complicated. She starts in that mode, where she has a fledgling sense of sexuality, although it doesn’t yet have a name. It’s not been contextualised by society’s expectations of how we should package our desire, who we should want or how we should present our wanting. She shows this lovely little window into the potential for girls to grow into our bodies and sexualities before we are set upon by social expectations and patriarchal structures that confine, censure and control those sexualities.

She gives us a little glimmer, then goes into the ways that happened for her. She was precocious, grew into her body before most of her peers, and was singled out—experienced sexual shaming. I wanted to sing out with recognition when I read these pages; someone had put words to something I hadn’t understood about my own life before. I had a very strong sense of sexuality from a young age and I was deeply curious, sexually exploratory, but very quickly, that sense of sexuality was shamed by my peers. It changed the trajectory of every sexual experience afterwards in my teen years.

After being labelled a ‘slut,’ there was a certain sense of: Well, so be it. I wasn’t going to fight it. A lot of the dangerous or self-destructive actions I took after that I’ve never really fully understood. Because I chose them, to a degree. I pursued them. There’s a conflict between an active sense of desire and longing and curiosity and the more toxic ways I felt censured and shamed for it, and the defiance that was required to keep behaving that way. The internalised shame was messy in my head and still is, as you can probably tell.

She articulates that same experience so beautifully and with such intellect. I’m enormously grateful for her and her work.

She digs into historical usage of the word ‘slut’: “a dirty woman, without any sexual connotation…a female dog…a rag dipped in lard to light in place of a candle.”

She has amazing assurance. She’ll go from Lacan to Nicholas Cage’s Valley Girl, to Darwin, and a bit of Jamaica Kincaid thrown in there. This will all be in one essay, which she pulls together with her own experiences. So she brings all these influences, these scenes, these thinkers, these cultural artefacts together to find her way through.

I think the idea here that the forces that shape us in puberty determine the decisions we make well into adulthood was at the heart of my investigation that became Amphibian and why this time in life is worthy of having a voice in literature.

Your novel examines the intensity of early friendship in girlhood, and this is the theme of your next memoir recommendation, which is Lilly Dancyger’s First Love: Essays on Friendship. The publisher’s blurb says it “treats women’s friendships as the love stories they truly are.”

She’s a wonderful writer. This book revolves around the central essay about the tragic murder of her cousin Sabina when Sabina was a teenager and Lilly was 23. They were not only cousins, but best friends, two peas in a pod. She writes that they didn’t see the other as being distinct. There’s a real sense of being bound, and how beautiful this is—loving someone in that way where you are defined by them, and they by you. The adoration of that kind of friendship—it becomes part of you for ever. So this first love with Sabina is the frame for Lilly’s exploration, with each subsequent essay focusing on a different formative friendship through her coming of age until the present.

One of the things I love about this is the idea that we are not only defined by the romantic loves in our lives but by the friendships too, which is so true. I can’t speak to men’s experiences, but I do think a girl’s first intense female friendship is akin to a romantic love, that kind of obsessive friendship where there might even be a thin line between that level of friendship and desire, a boundary that is sort of porous because you are feeling intense things for the first time. Later that gets transposed onto a partner. But I really love how she centres these relationships.

I also really related to Lilly’s descriptions of her girlhood, in her acting out, her vulnerability, her defiance. I was a very wild teenager, indulged in every drug anybody offered me, sought them out single-mindedly. I often look back on that young person, that child, and think about what it was that drove me. She describes her having a similar sort of drive, a similar conflict over whether she was actually having fun too. Questioning why she has to take it so far.

Through my teen years, people said: Oh, it’s a cry for help. I was like: Yes! It’s a cry for help! Why is no one helping me? Lilly writes about exactly this, and how she hit a wall with her self-destructive behaviour, when she realised no one was going to come save her. Her artist father had died when she was twelve—that’s what her first memoir is about, Negative Space, which is also really beautiful. So she lived as the child of parents with addiction, with this enormous grief of losing her dad, dropped out of school, worked in a bar in New York in the East Village underage. And it was her group of friends that saved her and became her family. And she saved them too. I don’t know how anyone could read this book and not want to be her friend.

It’s interesting how the very specificity of memoir, what makes other people’s stories other people’s stories, can allow us to understand our own stories better.

Yes, in memoir we are always looking for the particular that speaks to the universal. So the more specific sensory details you can give about how you felt, how it came about, opens up the capacity for people to connect with you, engage with what you are feeling, and to find that thread that connects to their own experience. I think all of these pieces of work do that successfully.

I think that might bring us to the final book you’ve chosen to recommend: I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, the first book in Maya Angelou’s autobiographical series. It’s a memoir of a traumatic girlhood. Perhaps you’d offer a précis for anyone who hasn’t read it yet.

Yes. There’s a lovely line in it that connects to everything we’ve been talking about: “Few, if any, survive their teens.” This book describes her childhood, growing up in Stamps, Arkansas. She and her brother arrive at the house of their grandmother, having been dispatched by their own father and mother. The threat of racial violence is always present, and her increasing awareness of that as she grows older. At the centre of it is a rape: she was raped by her mother’s boyfriend at eight years old.

I was given this book by my mother when I was a teenager. It showed me that these stories of girlhood and self realisation matter—that they have a place, should be told and shared, and they’re important. I’m not sure if that’s why she decided to give it to me; I was never able to ask her and she’s passed now. I still have my mum’s copy.

But what do I find interesting about it? So many things. Firstly, it’s so beautifully written. Her voice is right there, all the time, so strong through it all. And she has wonderfully lyrical descriptions of the American south, of San Francisco or family picnics, totally evocative. Even in these moments of lyricism, the voice never slips. Sometimes we can become artificial—how we speak and how we write is so different. But she never slips into artifice.

While this rape, is central to what happens to her, in some ways it does not define her sense of personhood. In some ways, she’s not given the space to allow it to define her, because although she is given a moment to heal, she is then expected to just get on with it. Her trauma isn’t given any space in her life as a young person.

She stopped talking for several years. I think they called her ‘uppity’ for not talking, when clearly that’s the reaction of a traumatised child. But then the book—and, in some ways, also she—keeps going. She discovers books, she keeps moving through the world. I think that resilience is what struck me.

By the end, she finds her agency, becomes an agent in her own life, starts making choices for herself and her body. For better or worse, the book ends when she gets pregnant after her first time having consensual sex. You see her at the very end, trying to understand her body and make sense of it. She’s always felt ungainly. She’s tall, she feels she’s clumsy. And she worries that when she sleeps with the baby in her bed she’s going to crush it or push it out of bed. But her mother encourages her to sleep with the baby, then she wakes her—and naturally the two of them are curled around each other, and there’s a sense of trusting her body and herself and that it will be okay. It ends on that beautiful image.

In a book of great hardship, a lot of suffering and violence, I’ve always found that image redemptive: these three women together, the intergenerational learning in that moment, and the potential for that even amidst the trauma and the pain.

Obviously this book had a big impact on me. But I think I forgot it was memoir. Because it took me a really long time to write memoir and call it memoir. The first story I submitted during a creative writing module at university, I wrote about a sexual experience that I’d had when I was younger that I was trying to make sense of. I called it fiction, but it was almost entirely true. You could see what I was trying to do with memoir, but it took me so long to give myself permission to do that—to write about what has happened to me, what I’ve been through, and to call it nonfiction, call it memoir, and to feel that it had a place.

So I’m very grateful to all of these writers, for doing that and helping me learn these lessons.