Here are 100 books that Childhood fans have personally recommended if you like
Childhood.
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I am a French novelist, the author of fifteen novels, many of which are memoirs, so I am considered a specialist of "autofiction" in France, of fiction written about oneself. But I also love writing about others, as you can see in my novel on David Hockney. Beauvoir, Sarraute and Ernaux were my models, Laurens and Appanah are my colleagues. Three of the books I picked would be called memoirs in the States, and the other two novels. In France, they are in the same category. All these women write beautifully about childhood and womanhood. I love their writing because it is both intimate and universal, full of emotion, but in a very sober and precise style.
In A Girl’s StoryAnnieErnaux – the author of many memoirs about her parents, her lower-class background, and her sexual life – revisits the summer when she was 18 and a summer camp counselor. For the first time away from home, she was so eager for love that she ended up pursuing a man who dumped and humiliated her. Ernaux has a unique way to find lost time again. She scrutinizes the past with such a precise scalpel that it allows us to identify with the lost young girl and to share her confusion and shame.
'I too wanted to forget that girl. Really forget her, that is, stop yearning to write about her. Stop thinking that I have to write about this girl and her desire and madness, her idiocy and pride, her hunger and her blood that ceased to flow. I have never managed to do so.' In A Girl's Story, her latest book, Annie Ernaux revisits the summer of 1958, spent working as a holiday camp instructor in Normandy, and recounts the first night she spent with a man. When he moves on, she realizes she has submitted her will to his and…
I am a French novelist, the author of fifteen novels, many of which are memoirs, so I am considered a specialist of "autofiction" in France, of fiction written about oneself. But I also love writing about others, as you can see in my novel on David Hockney. Beauvoir, Sarraute and Ernaux were my models, Laurens and Appanah are my colleagues. Three of the books I picked would be called memoirs in the States, and the other two novels. In France, they are in the same category. All these women write beautifully about childhood and womanhood. I love their writing because it is both intimate and universal, full of emotion, but in a very sober and precise style.
Abandonment and the end of love terrify me. In The Woman Destroyed, the happy diary of a fifty-year-old woman turns into a descent into hell when Beauvoir's narrator finds out that her husband is having an affair and is actually leaving her. Beauvoir wrote it in order to send a feminist message to women in the fifties, to convince them to get a job and define their identity outside their family life. I wonder, however, whether the intensity of the grief we feel in that novella wasn't experienced by Beauvoir herself the summer when her American lover, the novelist Nelson Algren, broke up their transcontinental passion of four years.
First published in 1967, this book consists of three short novellas on the theme of women's vulnerability - in the first, to the process of ageing, in the second to loneliness, and, in the third, to the growing indifference of a loved one.
THE WOMAN DESTROYED is a collection of three stories, each an exquisite and passionate study of a woman trapped by circumstances, trying to rebuild her life.
In the first story, 'The Age of Discretion', a successful scholar fast approaching middle age faces a double shock - her son's abandonment of the career she has chosen for him…
I am a French novelist, the author of fifteen novels, many of which are memoirs, so I am considered a specialist of "autofiction" in France, of fiction written about oneself. But I also love writing about others, as you can see in my novel on David Hockney. Beauvoir, Sarraute and Ernaux were my models, Laurens and Appanah are my colleagues. Three of the books I picked would be called memoirs in the States, and the other two novels. In France, they are in the same category. All these women write beautifully about childhood and womanhood. I love their writing because it is both intimate and universal, full of emotion, but in a very sober and precise style.
I was immediately engaged in the story of a nurse who follows a man to Mayotte and, unable to conceive, adopts a child whom she brings up by herself after the man abandons her. She dies abruptly, however, and the story changes completely, turning into an intense, violent novel about children in the slums. The orphan who fled after his mother's death is horribly abused by another young teenager who is a gang leader, and can free himself only by killing him in the end. I am in awe of Nathacha Appanah for her ability to capture the voice of street children. This is a poignant, powerful, and beautifully written novel about harassment, cruelty, and possession.
Marie, a nurse on the island of Mayotte, adopts an abandoned baby and names him Moise, raising him as a French boy. As he grows up, Moise struggles with his status as an "outsider" and to understand why he was abandoned as a baby. When Marie dies, he is left alone, plunged into uncertainty and turmoil, ending up in the largest and most infamous slum on Mayotte, nicknamed "Gaza".
Narrated by five different characters, Tropic of Violence is an exploration of lost youth on the French island of Mayotte in the Indian Ocean. Shining a powerful light on problems of…
Tap Dancing on Everest, part coming-of-age memoir, part true-survival adventure story, is about a young medical student, the daughter of a Holocaust survivor raised in N.Y.C., who battles self-doubt to serve as the doctor—and only woman—on a remote Everest climb in Tibet.
I am a French novelist, the author of fifteen novels, many of which are memoirs, so I am considered a specialist of "autofiction" in France, of fiction written about oneself. But I also love writing about others, as you can see in my novel on David Hockney. Beauvoir, Sarraute and Ernaux were my models, Laurens and Appanah are my colleagues. Three of the books I picked would be called memoirs in the States, and the other two novels. In France, they are in the same category. All these women write beautifully about childhood and womanhood. I love their writing because it is both intimate and universal, full of emotion, but in a very sober and precise style.
Even though I never felt badly treated for growing up as a girl in a patriarchal world as Camille Laurens did, I loved her book. The first part, which starts with the sentence “It’s a girl,” recounts her childhood in a provincial French town in the sixties, where sexism still reigns. The distressing second part describes the loss of her son at birth. The third part is about her relationship with her daughter — born after the lost son — who, in spite of her mother's best efforts, grew up as a tomboy. The novel cleverly ends when the daughter, 16, tells her mom who asks whether her date is a nice boy: “It’s a girl.” This novel is also the most fascinating book about genre.
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,…
Fiona Sampson is a leading British poet and writer, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, awarded an MBE for services to literature. Published in thirty-seven languages, she’s the recipient of numerous national and international awards. Her twenty-eight books include the critically acclaimed In Search of Mary Shelley, and Two-Way Mirror: The life of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and she’s Emeritus Professor of Poetry, University of Roehampton.
Simone de Beauvoir’s Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter is a classic. First published in France in 1958, it’s the opening volume of an autobiographical trilogy. This exploration of the childhood and young womanhood that created the world-famous writer and intellectual is compendious, descriptive – and alert at every turn, as befits the mother of existentialism, to how the emerging psyche understands the world around it.
“[Beauvoir’s] graciously written memoirs carry distinct appeal in recording the emotional and intellectual birth pangs of a fascinating woman.” —Time
A superb autobiography by one of the great literary figures of the twentieth century, Simone de Beauvoir's Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter offers an intimate picture of growing up in a bourgeois French family, rebelling as an adolescent against the conventional expectations of her class, and striking out on her own with an intellectual and existential ambition exceedingly rare in a young woman in the 1920s.
Beauvoir vividly evokes her friendships, love interests, mentors, and the early days of the…
I’ve lived this theme—my father died just before I turned three years old and I’ve been haunted by his death ever since, especially during my growing up. It’s informed everything I’ve ever written, including an essay I wrote for The New York Times Magazine which they ranked in 2017 as one of their 16 all-time best Lives columns.
When I was in college, I told my writing teacher I wanted to write about my father’s death, which had happened when I was very little. My teacher, a famous writer, lost his father when he was very little too, but he told me he never wrote about it directly. I looked for examples in literature of someone writing autobiographically about a loss in early childhood and I only ever found one: Tolstoy’s debut novel, Childhood, Boyhood, Youth. Tolstoy’s mother died when he was 2, his father when he was 8, and he writes about it with unparalleled power across his oeuvre, but never so directly and autobiographically as in Childhood, Boyhood, Youth. He made it OK for me to write my own autobiographical novel about childhood loss.
Leo Tolstoy began his trilogy, Childhood, Boyhood, Youth, in his early twenties. Although he would in his old age famously dismiss it as an 'awkward mixture of fact and fiction', generations of readers have not agreed, finding the novel to be a charming and insightful portrait of inner growth against the background of a world limned with extraordinary clarity, grace and colour. Evident too in its brilliant account of a young person's emerging awareness of the world and of his place within it are many of the stances, techniques and themes that would come to full flower in the immortal…
Meet Lev Gleason, a real-life comics superhero! Gleason was a titan among Golden Age comics publishers who fought back against the censorship campaigns and paranoia of the Red Scare. After dropping out of Harvard to fight in World War I in France, Gleason moved to New York City and eventually…
I’m a child of the Cold War. Until the collapse of the Iron Curtain in 1989 this strange standoff between the Soviet Union and the Western allies informed everyone’s life, but my own case was particular because my father served in the Royal Air Force. For three years he was even in command of three squadrons of nuclear bombers. With a background like that, how could I not be interested in the larger picture? Since then I have gone on to write novels with all kinds of settings but the other side of the now defunct Iron Curtain has always held a fascination... and has directly led to at least three of my own books.
Svetlana Alliluyeva was Josef Stalin’s daughter. In 1967 she fled to the West bringing this memoir with her. It was published to universal acclaim in the same year. An epistolary memoir it gives remarkable insight into her life growing up in the Kremlin. Haunting, at times lyrical, always affecting, she shows Stalin as something other than the monster we take him to be. She makes no excuses for him but it is salutary to see him portrayed as a father and a human being. An antidote to the all-too-easy dismissal of him as ‘a monster’.
In this riveting, New York Times-bestselling memoir—first published by Harper in 1967—Svetlana Alliluyeva, subject of Rosemary Sullivan’s critically acclaimed biography, Stalin’s Daughter, describes the surreal experience of growing up in the Kremlin in the shadow of her father, Joseph Stalin.
Svetlana Iosifovna Alliluyeva, later known as Lana Peters, was the youngest child and only daughter of Joseph Stalin and Nadezhda Alliluyeva, his second wife. In 1967, she fled the Soviet Union for India, where she approached the U.S. Embassy for asylum. Once there, she showed her CIA handler something remarkable: A personal memoir about growing up inside the Kremlin that…
I’m a Swedish American journalist, blogger, and author whose writings about Scandinavian parenting culture have appeared in newspapers, magazines, and online publications across the world, including Time.com, Parents.com, and Green Child Magazine. I’m particularly interested in the role of nature in childhood and believe the best memories are created outside, while jumping in puddles, digging in dirt, catching bugs and climbing trees. In 2013, I started the blog Rain or Shine Mamma to inspire other parents and caregivers to get outside with their children every day, regardless of the weather. I’m currently working on my second book, about the Nordic outdoor tradition friluftsliv, which will be published by Tarcher Perigee in 2022.
The title alone of this book was enough to get me hooked since my experience with young children was that they typically don’t eat anything – and I know I’m not alone. Le Billon gives us a peek into the culinary lives of French parents and shares her best tips for getting kids to not only eat what the adults eat, which in France may involve both beef tongue and smelly blue cheese, but also enjoy it.
Far too many parents face an ongoing struggle to get their kids to eat well, so why is it that French children gladly wolf down all the things our kids hate - the dreaded spinach or broccoli, fish, olives, salad...? In French Kids Eat Everything, Karen Le Billon shares her experience of moving to France and finding the inspiration to transform her family's approach to eating.
If you've ever tried hiding healthy foods in your kids' meals, bribing them to finish - or even start - something healthy, or simply given up in exasperation at your child's extensive list of…
When the pandemic arrived, I feared that my father, who was then in his late eighties, would certainly die from the coronavirus. What made my anxiety more terrible, I think, was that I was at work on a novel where the father was dying. Then, the vaccine became available, and I was relieved when, living thousands of miles away from my father, I heard the news that my father had been vaccinated. The father in my novel wasn’t so lucky. While my father lived, I began reading what other writers had written about their fathers, particularly their deaths. I’m listing below a few of my favorites.
I read this book long before Annie Ernaux was awarded the Nobel Prize. It was the first of her books that I read, and I was so seized by her style of narration that I proceeded to read with devotion everything she had written.
In one of the early pages of this book, Ernaux declares that in writing about her father, she didn’t want falsity or an overblown style, no artsy attempt to produce something “’ moving’ or ‘gripping.’” The style she followed was true to the life she was describing as a working-class man with minimum education. Here is a book that pays tribute to life but also enacts a credo for what Ernaux calls a “neutral way of writing”: “no lyrical reminiscences, no triumphant displays of irony.”
Annie Ernaux's father died exactly two months after she passed her practical examination for a teaching certificate. Barely educated and valued since childhood strictly for his labor, Ernaux's father had grown into a hard, practical man who showed his family little affection.
Narrating his slow ascent towards material comfort, Ernaux's cold observation reveals the shame that haunted her father throughout his life. She scrutinizes the importance he attributed to manners and language that came so unnaturally to him as he struggled to provide for his family…
Although the books on my list all delve into the history of Queen Marie
Antoinette and her family, they also provide an understanding of the
chaotic period leading up to the French Revolution. I’ve always been
fascinated by the historical drama, controversy, and tragedy of her
personal life, but the readings on my list also explore the social
changes in manners, clothing styles, and class distinctions that
accompanied the political unrest.
Susan Nagel charted Marie-Thérèse's life during the turmoil of the French Revolution. The only survivor of the royal family locked in Temple Prison, despite the harrowing experience of her family’s demise and the French Revolution, Marie Antoinette’s daughter emerged as a remarkably strong figure in French history.
Marie-Thérèse journeyed from the horrors of the Temple prison and her family’s death to a dignified role at court when she married her cousin and the monarchy returned after the Revolution and Napoleon’s empire. I was amazed at how little I knew about Marie-Thérèse—she was even queen for 20 minutes when her husband reigned and abdicated!
In December 1795, seventeen-year-old Marie-Therese, the only surviving child of Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI, fled Paris's notorious Temple Prison. Kept in solitary confinement after her parents' brutal execution during the Terror, she had been unaware of the fate of her family, save the cries she heard of her young brother being tortured in an adjacent cell. She emerged to an uncertain future: an orphan, exile and focus of political plots and marriage schemes of the crowned heads of Europe. Susan Nagel tells a remarkable story of an astonishing woman whose life was shrouded in mystery, from her birth in…
