a girl without a story

Alice Zeniter

(L’Arche, 1112 pages, 2021)

***Alice Zeniter, winner of 2022 Dublin literary award***

***More than 25,000 copies sold***

“A good story, even today, is often that of a guy doing stuff. And if it can be a bit violent, if it can include meat, a rifle and spears, that’s even better” writes Alice Zeniter in this engaging essay as stimulating as a one-woman show. But what place, in such stories, is given to female characters and the representation of their bodies? Inspired by Ursula K. Le Guin’s Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, Zeniter dissects how patriarchy has shaped narratives since ancient times. From literature to political discourse, she explains in her own unmistakable voice the workings of storycraft and the power of fiction.

 With playful irony and refreshing lucidity, Zeniter deconstructs the model of the hero, offers instructive and accessible notions on semiology and narratology, and leads us in a buoyant rereading of classic authors: Aristotle, Roland Barthes, Baudelaire, André Breton, Leo Tolstoy, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. She invokes Umberto Eco’s essay “Weeping for Anna Karenina” to explore our relationship to fictional characters. And not least she delights us with page notes as stimulating as the text itself.

 In this fun essay, enlivened with personal stories and pop culture references, Zeniter engages us in reflecting not only on the stories we read but also the ones we create and release into the world.

Alice Zeniter is a French novelist, translator, screenwriter, and director. Her novel Take This Man was published in English by Europa Editions in 2011. Zeniter has won many awards in France for her work, including the Prix littéraire de la Porte Dorée, the Prix Renaudot des Lycéens, and the Prix Goncourt des Lycéens, which was awarded to The Art of Losing (‎Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021).