Writers like Elena Ferrante are putting the pain of teenage girls centre stage | Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett
Female authors’ coming-of-age stories, including Normal People, can help us reassess our attitudes to the trauma of youth
I seem to have spent much of the lockdown inside the minds of teenagers. Two of the books that I have been able to finish, despite having difficulty concentrating, have been coming-of-age stories about teenage girls, by and . Ernaux’s , published by Fitzcarraldo, fills a lacuna in the French author’s ongoing multiple-memoir project, telling of an early, traumatic sexual experience in 1958 that has taken her six decades to write about. Ferrante’s forthcoming (Europa Editions) tells of Giovanna, a teenage Neapolitan girl torn between two very different cities
