Overstepping the Boundaries: Sexual Awakening, Trauma, and Writing in Annie Ernaux’s Mémoire de fille and Christine Angot’s Une semaine de vacances

This article considers boundary negotiation and disturbance in two texts, both powerful articulations of the authors’ earliest experiences of sex: Annie Ernaux’s Mémoire de fille (2016) and Christine Angot’s Une semaine de vacances (2012). While French women’s writing has recast the script of sexual pleasure in often empowering ways, these works tell a different story: one of coercion, uncertainty, damage, and vulnerability. Drawing on Judith Butler, the chapter shows how both authors challenge the unspeakable taboo that this experience had become for them, and argues that the very origins of their life-writing is tethered to this particular transgression of boundaries.