Girl, 1983

A woman struggles to write about what she had long thought unwritable in this intense meditation on trauma and art from Ullmann (Unquiet). The narrator, a 55-year-old writer and translator in Oslo, recounts how at 16, while living in New York City, she met a 40-something fashion photographer in the elevator of her apartment building and accepted his invitation to a photo shoot in Paris, despite her mother’s objections. Looking back, she cautiously approaches describing what is clearly a traumatic episode, the details of which she gradually comes to terms with (“the never-ending night, a night whose scope, nearly forty years on, I struggle to comprehend”). In her halting attempts to bring order and precision to her “spiral of restlessness, forgetfulness and unfinished stories,” she finds inspiration and comfort in confessional writing by Sharon Olds, Annie Ernaux, and Anne Carson, each of whom “were here before me and who’ve been where I am now.” The solemn tone never wavers, which some readers may find stultifying, but the narrator’s vivid memories of her youth—colors, impressions, lacerating remarks—culminate in an unflinching description of the fateful encounter with the photographer. The result is a mesmerizing act of recollection and reconstitution. Agent: Sarah Chalfant, Wylie Agency. (July)