The Other Girl

In this gently heartbreaking account, Nobel Prize winner Ernaux (The Use of Photography) reflects on the death of her older sister, Ginette, in 1938, two years before the author was born. Months before the diphtheria vaccine was made compulsory in France, six-year-old Ginette died of the disease. Taking inspiration from Franz Kafka’s Letter to His Father, Ernaux addresses her late sibling directly, compiling all she knows of Ginette’s life, death, and legacy into a diaristic dossier. Though Ernaux’s parents never spoke of Ginette, the author tracks down and interviews the few living people who remember the girl’s death, seeking to map the devastation it wrought on her family before Ernaux was born. Elsewhere, she recalls hearing adults call Ginette a “nice” girl and Ernaux a “demon,” which saddled her with lifelong feelings of inadequacy, and makes a number of poignant literary allusions, comparing her late sister to Peter Pan and Jane Eyre’s tuberculosis-stricken Helen Burns. Poetic and raw but never maudlin, this beautiful meditation on a very particular kind of grief will resonate with anyone trying to process a major loss of their own. Photos. (Sept.)