Camille Laurens

Laurence Barraqué est née en 1959 dans une famille de la petite bourgeoisie de Rouen. Son père est médecin et sa mère femme au foyer. Très tôt elle comprend, à travers le langage et l'éducation de ses parents, que la position des filles est inférieure à celles des garçons. Cette expérience se prolonge à l'école, au cours de danse, à la bibliothèque municipale, partout où le langage impose la position dominante du genre masculin : « Garce. Le mot revient et la hante. C'est une injure. Mais n'est-ce pas d'abord le féminin de garçon ? Tout ce qui est féminin déçoit, déchoit, elle le sait désormais. Garçon, c'est un constat. Garce, c'est un jugement. Le mot, en changeant de genre, devient mauvais. Mais il a des pouvoirs. » Dans ce roman d'une puissance exceptionnelle, Camille Laurens déploie le destin d'une femme confrontée aux mutations de la société française de ces quarante dernières années. La narratrice emporte dans sa voix les grandes problématiques de l'éducation des femmes, de la domination masculine et de la transmission des valeurs féministes aux jeunes générations. Le parcours de Laurence Barraqué se fait la chambre d'échos de toutes celles qui furent élevées dans l'idée d'une supériorité des hommes. L'auteur saisit avec acuité les moments charnières de l'enfance au cours desquels se joue l'adulte que l'on va devenir. L'écriture de Camille Laurens atteint ici une maitrise remarquable, qui restitue les grandes embardées de la vie tout en faisant résonner la petite musique des mots.

From the acclaimed author of Little Dancer Aged Fourteen, a deeply personal and insightful account of being a girl, woman, and mother in a world that sees the feminine as less than. Born in 1959 to a middle-class family, Laurence Barraqué grows up with her sister in the northern city of Rouen. Her father is a doctor, her mother a housewife. She understands from an early age, by way of language and her parents’ example, that a girl’s place in life is inferior to a boy’s: Asked for the 1964 census whether he has any children, her father promptly responds, “No. I have two daughters.” When Laurence eventually becomes a mother herself in the 90s, she grapples with the question of what it means to be a girl, to have a girl, and what lessons she should try to pass down or undo. Masterful in her analysis of the subtle and obvious ways women are undermined by a sexist society, Camille Laurens lays out her experiences of the past forty years in this poignant, powerful book. Girl is at once intimate and sweeping in its depiction of the great challenges we face, such as equalizing the education system and transmitting feminist values to the younger generations.

This absorbing, heartfelt work uncovers the story of the real dancer behind Degas's now-iconic sculpture, and the struggles of late nineteenth-century Parisian life. She is famous throughout the world, but how many know her name? You can admire her figure in Washington, Paris, London, New York, Dresden, or Copenhagen, but where is her grave? We know only her age, fourteen, and the work that she did--because it was already grueling work, at an age when children today are sent to school. In the 1880s, she danced as a "little rat" at the Paris Opera, and what is often a dream for young girls now wasn't a dream for her. She was fired after several years of intense labor; the director had had enough of her repeated absences. She had been working another job, even two, because the few pennies the Opera paid weren't enough to keep her and her family fed. She was a model, posing for painters or sculptors--among them Edgar Degas. Drawing on a wealth of historical material as well as her own love of ballet and personal experiences of loss, Camille Laurens presents a compelling, compassionate portrait of Marie van Goethem and the world she inhabited that shows the importance of those who have traditionally been overlooked in the study of art.

NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE STARRING JULIETTE BINOCHE This psychological thriller dissects online relationships, offering a stunning indictment of the way society perceives women in contrast to men when age comes into play. This is the story of Claire Millecam, a forty-eight-year-old teacher and divorcée who creates a fake social media profile to keep tabs on Joe, her occasional, elusive, and inconstant lover. Under the false identity of Claire Antunes, a young and beautiful twenty-four-year-old, she starts a correspondence with Chris—pseudonym KissChris—which soon turns into an Internet love affair. A  Dangerous Liaisons  for our times,  Who You Think I Am  exposes the disconnect between fantasy and reality. Social media allows us to put ourselves on display, to indulge in secrets, but above all to lie, to recreate a life, to become our own fiction—magnifying and manipulating the double standards to which older women are held when they refuse to give up on desire. Simultaneously sensual, intellectually stimulating, and utterly relevant, this page-turner will stick in your mind long after reading.