In her highly acclaimed fictional memoir, Strangers: A Family Romance, Emma Tennant painted a picture of her eccentric forebears. Now, in Girlitude, she gives us a description of her own life as a girl; but in this account there is no fictionalisation. From 'the brightly lit scenes which furnish memory', Tennant provides a memoir of the Fifties and Sixties, a memoir of the times. Girlitude opens with the author's Coming-Out Ball, where we find her wondering what on earth she is supposed to do in life. Marriage seems the only option...Yet this girl escapes-at first-in her search for a system which will change the world, and enable her to find her own identity. But, like a modern Donna Quixote tilting at windows, she falls into adversity, as well as numerous marriages along the way. The worlds of gambling, satire and revolution first welcome and then repel the hapless traveller through the changing times, from Fifties Boom to Sixties Lust. Girlitrude - funny, sad and shocking by turns-is above all the story of what it was, in those golden and reprehensible days, to be a girl.
