This is a really good book that I didn’t expect to like as much as I did. There were some parts that were a little slow but overall would recommend!

Girl, 1983 is a raw look at how young women are perceived and treated by society, largely based on the author's own experience as a model in Paris in the 1980s. Our MC looks back on her youth. Very much putting the reader in the mind of the narrator, the story is tough to follow at times, written in a stream of consciousness.

I think it had a good message but it was hard to connect with considering how it was written. Pick this book up if you're willing to muddle through some stylistic choices to think about the world in an honest, if uncomfortable way.

I honestly did not enjoy this book. It is written in an almost stream-of-consciousness style so there is no plot. It's about an older woman remembering a time when she was 16 and was photographed by a guy named K. The story just jumps all over the place. She is always talking to someone, and I still am not sure exactly who she is speaking to. At first I thought it was her younger self then I thought maybe a twin that died in the womb. I don't know. This book just wasn't for me.

What a powerful book about the vulnerability of being a young woman. I underlined and will return to so many things in this story.

This novel has had some good press so I moved it up my reading list. Did I love it too? Not really. It’s a fine piece of work and its territory is disturbing and perennially relevant. It’s core is the abuse of the narrator in Paris when she’s 16, something she takes the whole book to reveal and confront, filling the other pages with other eras, her mother, her adult life, other cities, dog walks, a sort of other self and more. While the splintered structure makes sense, it’s also quite offputting. That, I think, is the book’s dilemma, for me - its technique and import are undeniable, but reading it was an uphill struggle.

Linn Ullmann takes us throughout someone's life through at least two marriages and tells us about how she lost her virginity and then how she got into a sexual relationship in Paris. She tells how she kept going to the bathroom and throwing up in Paris. It goes into each relationship, as she get older each time it revolves around the time in Paris and how it affects her. Each time she reveals something different. She also posts different sayings in her story, which she documents in her final chapter.