I Was the Girl
An ingenious and beautifully written literary response to an American classic
She was seventeen, living in rural France. He was an American writer with a family back home. Decades later, she picks up the erotic novel he wrote about their affair — and understands, with sudden clarity, that what he called sport and a pastime was, for her, the start of everything.
Susanne Rudloff
srudloff@amboanthos.nl
I Was the Girl is an answer to a novel that is never named — yet readers familiar with James Salter's A Sport and a Pastime will recognize it immediately. Near the end of his life, Salter more or less admitted that the young French woman in his book had truly existed. Anne Mieke Backer gives her a voice.
It is the 1960s. Anne grows up with her mother beside a canal in a quiet village in the Morvan. She uses her body as a key to unlock a different life, not yet fully aware of the risks that come with being young and female in a world shaped by men.
‘He entered my life like someone walking into an unfamiliar room, feeling for the light switch in the dark. He found it quickly. And once I'd brought him to the other side, I stood there in a warm glow — as if I myself were the light.'
Just as Percival Everett reimagined Huckleberry Finn in James, Backer reclaims a canonical text from the inside out — elegant, sharp, and entirely her own.
A captivating debut about unequal love — not a settling of scores but a layered, stylistically brilliant story. A beautiful love affair, a feminist takeover, or both at once: Salter seen through the eyes of Annie Ernaux.
NRC ★★★★★
Reading Backer after Salter is an enriching experience. Her book stands on its own, claiming a rightful place in the counter-narrative canon.
de Volkskrant
It takes real guts to frame your literary debut as a response to a world-famous novel. Backer does it with verve, portraying her protagonist in the charged space between innocence and naivety, manipulation and desire.
Het Parool
