Böcker av Camille Laurens

From the acclaimed author of Little Dancer Aged Fourteen, a deeply personal and insightful account of being a girl, woman, and mother in a world that sees the feminine as less than.Born in 1959 to a middle-class family, Laurence Barraqué grows up with her sister in the northern city of Rouen. Her father is a doctor, her mother a housewife. She understands from an early age, by way of language and her parents’ example, that a girl’s place in life is inferior to a boy’s: Asked for the 1964 census whether he has any children, her father promptly responds, “No. I have two daughters.” When Laurence eventually becomes a mother herself in the nineties, she grapples with the question of what it means to be a girl, to have a girl, and what lessons she should try to pass down or undo. Masterful in her analysis of the subtle and obvious ways women are undermined by a sexist society, Camille Laurens lays out her experiences of the past forty years in this poignant, powerful book. Girl is at once intimate and sweeping in its depiction of the great challenges we face, such as equalizing the education system and transmitting feminist values to the younger generations.

She is famous throughout the world, but how many know her name? You can admire her figure in Washington, Paris, London, New York, Dresden, or Copenhagen, but where is her grave? She was fourteen in the Paris of the 1880s, eking out a living at the Paris Opera as a petit rat. She also worked as a model, posing for painters and sculptors-among them Edgar Degas. Laurens paints a compelling portrait of Marie van Goethem and the world she inhabited; a time when art unsettled the hypocrisy of society. Her passionate inquiry takes us through the underbelly of the Belle Epoque, casting a light on those who have traditionally been overlooked in the study of art, and opening a space for essential questions.