Girlitude: A Portrait of the 50s and 60s - Couverture rigide

From 'the brightly lit scenes which furnish memory', Tennant provides a memoir of her years from eighteen to thirty which is also 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 st the windmills, 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. GIRLITUDE - 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. (1999-09-09)

"What makes these memoirs so engaging, apart from the precision of the prose, is the self-mocking detachment with which Tennant depicts her own adolescent discomforts--She laughs at her mistakes with an infectious gaiety." - The Times

"Beautifully written." - Mail on Sunday