In a recent clinical supervision session at work, we were talking about ‘high-functioning freeze‘. I happened to be reading Girl, 1983 by Linn Ullmann at the time, and I immediately thought of the protagonist.

What happened to the protagonist – and if this book was called Girl, 2025, we would say that she had been sexually assaulted – unfolds in a series of vignettes. A sixteen-year-old girl is in Paris in 1983, alone, on a modelling assignment with a notable photographer, known only as ‘K’. On her first day in the city, she gets lost in the labyrinth of streets and can’t remember where her hotel is. In desperation, she goes to K’s studio, and the day turns into evening and then the next morning. There’s alcohol, cocaine and nightclubs involved.

If K can’t remember me – the sixteen-year-old girl who turned up on his doorstep one night – is everything that happened between us (and which I promised not to tell anyone) still our secret? Or is it only mine?

These scenes are spliced with the girl, younger and remembering time spent with her mother; and with her as a woman, with her own family, trying to make sense of her time in Paris.

The novel (and I’ll get to whether this is memoir in a moment), meanders. Motifs and language are repeated, which bolster the sense of walking around and around in Paris. This contrasts sharply with the lucid scenes of the present, and the dreamy innocence of childhood memories. I’m loathe to give too much away, however, the trauma she describes does not unfold in the way that I had initally anticipated. Nevertheless, this is absolutely a #MeToo story.

When I read Ullmann’s last ‘novel’, Unquiet, I noted that it was impossible to sort memoir from fiction. Does the same apply here? I hope this book is fiction, but somehow I doubt it.

Some people said it was a mistake to call my last book a novel when it was based on real events. I don’t know. When I was writing it, I thought mostly about the order of events, the ones I remembered and the ones I’d forgotten and which I had to imagine. Here too I’m trying to create order.

And I doubt it because her observations of a sixteen-year-old girl, in the eighties, are so precise that they give her away.

He said I smiled at him, but it’s not true. What I did when I sensed he was looking at me was to straighten my posture, roll my shoulders back – a flex – a simple piece of choreography for a sixteen-year-old girl who’s done with being a child…

Interestingly, Ullmann notes in the Acknowledgments that ‘Girl, 1983 is partly about the difficulty of translation’, which, in the context of shifting time frames, added a layer to the story about the imperfection of memory, and the importance of the narratives that we create to be able to hold an experience.

The events I’m relating here, what happened before, during and after K took a photograph of me in Paris, are made up mostly of forgetting, just as the body is composed mostly of water. The parts I can’t remember – perhaps only as dreams and sensations – seem to me unwritable, but I’m determined to write them down anyway.

And in understanding her trauma further she asks, ‘How do experiences live on, not as memories, but as absences?’

I’m not sure who to recommend this book to (the circuitous style will annoy some). As I was reading, I found elements repetitive, however, it also had me thinking about how memory works, and how the experiences we (me and my friends) had during the eighties and nineties that were dismissed as ‘nothing to get upset about’, would be viewed very differently these days.

I thought about all the locked-up, deranged, depressed and frightened women throughout history who’ve been prescribed a course of treatment consisting of do-not-speak, do-not-write, do-not-say-a-word-about-the-rage-and-despair.

Although this book doesn’t show off Ullmann’s writing in the way that Unquiet did, it still offers something authentic, memorable, and discussion-worthy.

3.5/5

There are some other people there, a small gathering, no dinner, just blue drinks and cocaine.