"While Ullmann is describing her exploitation as a young woman, she brings such precision and honesty to the telling, the book transcends the familiar #MeToo outline. An accomplished author… Ullmann captures the splintered, slippery nature of memory itself — a far more faithful rendering of how the mind works…"— Clare McHugh Washington Post
"A reader might get the sense that Ullmann has removed the top of her head in order to reveal the choreography of her mind. And yet, Ullmann calls this introspective book a novel, imposing some distance between herself and the story she’s told. She challenges the idea that memoir is more intimate than fiction, and manipulates genre to express a vulnerable relationship to her own cerebral archive: what she can claim to know, what she can’t bear to face, what she has lost."— Rachel Vorona Cote Atlantic
"[A] beautiful reflection on memory and desire… Elegantly spare and precise language heightens and underscores the woman’s anxiety and unease. A quietly absorbing portrait of a woman in the grip of depression searching for the truth of her younger self."— Booklist
"Girl, 1983 is now available in an English translation by Martin Aitken, who creates a restrained yet fraught atmosphere for a story that [Ullmann] sums up succinctly early on: ‘The story about the photograph makes me sick, it’s a shitty story.’ Post–Me Too, readers will likely have assumptions about where a shitty story involving a dramatic age gap, an isolating transatlantic journey, and the world of fashion photography will lead. And many of these assumptions will prove correct, but Ullmann’s probing tale is much more than the sum of its abusive or creepy particulars; it explores, among other ideas, the power struggle between forgetting and remembering and the line between fiction and nonfiction."— Cory Oldweiler Los Angeles Review of Books
"Ullmann has sought to refine experience into stories that carve order, even beauty, from a shadowed past. Call what she does ‘autofiction’ if you will — Girl, 1983 nods to Annie Ernaux, Marguerite Duras and other kindred literary spirits — but her method and manner has a tact and finesse all its own."— Financial Times
"In precise, lyrical prose, Ullmann creates a captivating portrait of a woman in search of herself, caught in a spiral of fear and loneliness…An engrossing, intimate narrative."— Kirkus (starred review)
"[T]he narrator’s vivid memories of her youth… culminate in an unflinching description of the fateful encounter with the photographer… [A] mesmerizing act of recollection and reconstitution."— Publishers Weekly
"Linn Ullmann’s gaze on the power and pain of a teenage girl as remembered and restaged by her adult self is unflinching and startling."— Deborah Levy, author of The Position of Spoons
"Linn Ullman’s writing, already distinct for its rare moral clarity, attains a new authority in Girl, 1983. It is the authority of focus, of a grip on life that grows more tenacious as its scope determinedly narrows. In the manner of Annie Ernaux, Ullman uses the act of attention as a weapon against indifference. It is as though by reconstructing the disorder of certain realities, she is able to confer sanity on them. Yet there is also a brightness and generosity to her work that seems to turn its themes—the powerlessness of youth and femininity, the intermingling of memory and shame—inside out."— Rachel Cusk, author of Parade
"Girl, 1983 unearths one young woman’s exhilaration, confusion, and darkness on the cusp of adulthood, drawn inexorably to glamour, only to discover its raw agonies. Linn Ullmann is a master of calm devastation; this is a haunting book."— Claire Messud, author of This Strange Eventful History
"Linn Ullmann’s new novel, Girl, 1983, is both beautiful and unsettling. A slow exploration of the narrator’s past becomes a quiet and disturbing interrogation of the world’s treatment of young women. Here beauty is a dangerous possession, drawing its owner into silence and complicity with those who would harm her. Brava to Ullmann for bravely taking on this dark subject, one which permeates our culture."— Roxanna Robinson, author of Leaving
"This book, about how we meet and understand the powers and the powerful vulnerabilities that form and have formed us, is written with extraordinary courage and a spirit that astounds. It's a work of real strength: poetic, witty, vital, cool and fevered both at once. Girl, 1983 does more than hold the self at all its ages. It pushes the fused power of memoir and story to a new dimension. I think it's a masterpiece."— Ali Smith, author of Gliff
★ 2025-05-03
A woman is beset by ghosts.
Following the autofictionalUnquiet (2019), evoking the death of her father, filmmaker Ingmar Bergman, award-winning novelist Ullmann meditates on memory, anxiety, and loss in a disquieting tale, gracefully translated from the Norwegian by Aitken. The haunted narrator is 55, with a 16-year-old daughter, obsessed with something that happened to her when she herself was 16, a disaffected high school junior living in New York with her actress mother. By chance, she meets a photographer, K, an urbane 44-year-old who invites her to be photographed in his Paris studio; longing “to be the object, the centre, the focus of another’s desire,” she convinces her mother to let her go. And so, in January 1983, after hastily checking into a hotel, she finds herself in a “bunker-like” studio among tall, skinny models and lecherous men. K hardly notices her, and when a few girls decide to leave, she goes along—unprepared for a decadent club scene. By the middle of the night, she’s alone, not knowing the name of her hotel, lost. The only address she has is K’s apartment, where she turns up at 2 a.m. The photograph he finally takes of her is the image that plummets her into the past. But memory is elusive: “The girl I was unravels whenever I draw near.” She struggles to distinguish “what happened and whatmay have happened”; she suffers recurring depression; and she is visited by an imaginary sister and the benevolent spirits of writers—Sharon Olds, Anne Sexton, Emily Dickinson—whose words she translates into Norwegian. Finding “the precise word,” she says, helps “to ease the dread." In precise, lyrical prose, Ullmann creates a captivating portrait of a woman in search of herself, caught in a spiral of fear and loneliness.
An engrossing, intimate narrative.
