In A Girl's Story (Mémoire de fille, Gallimard, 2016 ; translation : Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2020), Annie Ernaux revisits the events that marked her life in the years 1958-1960. She evokes a crucial episode in her young life that has never been directly tackled in her previous auto-sociobiographical work: her first humiliating sexual encounter at the age of 18 in the summer of 1958, when, as a student in her first year of secondary school in a Catholic school, she left for the first time her little town in Normandy and her parents, who were grocery clerks, to work as a summer camp counsellor. She found herself overpowered by the boy’s will and desire, she submited to him, before he moved on. Here, submerged in shame, humiliation, and betrayal, but also in self-discovery and self-reliance, lies the origin of her writing life. The themes of shame and memory, expressed differently than in the writer's previous works, remain at the heart of this new story, which has met the expectations of faithful female and male readers. The analysis of their letters shows once again that the writer's stories can participate in the (re)construction of the self and profoundly modify the relationship to the world of those who read her. A Girl's Story has even inspired and strengthened the writing of other authors, especially women writers.