Director Silvia Costa brings to the Italian stage her adaptation of A Girl’s Story, based on the novel by Nobel Prize-winning writer Annie Ernaux. In the book, Ernaux returns to the summer of 1958, when she was eighteen, to interrogate a decisive episode of her youth. Through fragments of memory, diary entries, letters, and photographs resurfacing from the past, the author reconstructs with clarity what happened then and the deep traces that experience has left on her life.
The narrative also becomes a lens on the social context of the time and on the expectations governing relationships between men and women, revealing how uneven the possibilities for freedom and self-expression often were. In A Girl’s Story, the voice of the adult writer confronts the young woman she once was, in a journey of memory, awareness, and gradual self-reappropriation. Published shortly before the emergence of the #MeToo movement, Ernaux’s book remains, today, an intimate yet profoundly political account of the power of memory and the end of silence.
