Paris, a winter's night in 1983. She is sixteen years old, lost in unfamiliar streets. On a scrap of paper in her pocket is the address of a photographer, K, thirty years her senior. Almost four decades later, as her life and the world around her begin to unravel, the grown woman seeks to comprehend the young girl of before.
Vivid ... Girl, 1983 is...deft in its experiments, subverting conventional ideas about fiction’s use of the truth ... Ullmann has not just written an autobiographical novel; she has suggested that every autobiography might be a novel in the first place ... Both distinctly personal and universally true.
[Ullmann] brings such precision and honesty to the telling, the book transcends the familiar #MeToo outline ... Ullmann captures the splintered, slippery nature of memory itself ... Spare, elliptical ... Such equivocalness and lack of resolution in Girl, 1983...will frustrate some readers ... Vivid ... Strangely, contradictorily, reassuring.
No precision in Girl, 1983. The book is endlessly recursive, as shapeless as water. It pools, eddies, evaporates ... At times I wondered if this was simply a bad book. But each time that doubt crept in, a diamond of a sentence...would catch me on its edge ... Though the project may be more useful to the writer than to the reader, she has nonetheless achieved something rare: She has created a reading experience as disorienting as one’s own ability to forget, capturing the way certain lapses of memory fuzz over into a white glare.
