Bitter, intense, and in the end, luminous, the story of a human being unlucky enough to be born a woman in a society and an era dominated by men.

Laurence Barraqué was born in 1959 into a middle-class family in Normandy. Very early on, her parents made it clear to her that girls are inferior to boys. This message was further confirmed at school, in dance class--wherever language imposed the male gender as dominant . In this novel, Camille Laurens depicts the life of a woman as she faces the changes in French society over the last 40 years: major issues related to women’s education, the persistence of male domination, and the passing on of feminist values to younger generations.