Written by Ruby Day, certified Girl
In all honesty, I first picked up Girl, 1983 for superficial reasons. As someone who lists watching the Friday night BBC4 re-runs of Top of the Pops as an active hobby, any mention of the 1980s often has me involuntarily hooked. The clean blue cover of Girl, 1983, featuring not only that crucial decade but the promise of immersing myself in the realities of girlhood at that time, was hard to ignore. I bought it without reading the synopsis.
For a few days, it sat amongst a pile of to-be-read books amassed over two birthdays and Christmases; I had deliberately stashed it in between other novels with as-yet-unbroken spines to suggest that I would hold off devouring the brand new book in favour of something else unread. Regardless, the eyes of the girl from 1983 refused to leave me. I wanted to meet her. Maybe we would be friends. Described by Ali Smith as “a masterpiece” that “pushes the fused power of memoir and story to a new dimension”, Girl, 1983 is a fictionalised biography of prominent Norwegian journalist and author, Linn Ullmann. The ‘fused’ composition renders what is true and what is fiction unclear, an ambiguity noted by Ullmann herself during the narrative. Unreliability permeates the book, creating a disturbing vista for the reader to navigate; chronologically traversing from point A to point B would undermine the tangible weight of what Ullmann is trying to remember, or absolve. As a result, Girl, 1983 reads like an exercise in unravelling the knotted earphone wires in your bag. Fragmentary passages stick out in the course of the book like unwelcome thoughts in the lull of sleep: varying from repeated small phrases, (“neurotic little bitch”, “vite, vite, vite”) to whole passages about Ullmann’s childhood, her mother, her dog, the loss of her virginity, or the strange absorbed sister/imaginary friend/analogy for mental illness she refers to as ‘you’. The disordered time frame and abrupt phraseology can be exasperating as a reader used to, or comfortable with, linear storytelling; themes are introduced and dismissed within pages, what at first seems relevant is cast aside instantly, resolutions are never fully reached. Perhaps this is a fault of mine, used to lazily following the primary school story mountain. Regardless of my own shortcomings, Girl, 1983 convincingly mirrors an adult woman trying to understand and reframe the buried anger of her sixteen-year-old self. As previously admitted, Girl, 1983 was bought to stoke my overly romantic imagination.
I had visions of 1980s Paris and New York painted in washed-out hues like an Éric Rohmer film, so my initial enjoyment was marred by frustration that this book had more to offer than insubstantial romance. By consistently interrupting the path of teenage Ullmann, the adult woman clarifies there is more here than meets the eye. You know what happens before she makes it explicit: it’s sex and sleaze and the grime lurking beneath glamour. For me, Girl, 1983 dealt with many girlish fantasies by thoroughly dispatching them. The ‘reveal’ is anticlimactic, nothing is a surprise. This is a story we all know, one so normalised that the author herself admits she never considered the events as anything to be angry about.
Cold and persistent, the girl in me realised slowly that it is, in fact, an “illusion that all life requires of you is to be a cute sort of girl in a cute dress”. A private fantasy of mine entertains being the beautiful pet of some mature man, well-kept and happy in idleness. To be successful, in corporate, capitalist terms, is becoming increasingly difficult for everyone, let alone those of us on the lesser side of the gender pay gap. Consequently, ‘If university doesn’t work out, I’ll marry a rich man’, is a phrase familiar to me. I’d picked up Girl, 1983 in the hopes of fuelling this fantasy. Instead, I faced a rude awakening.
I often find myself running away from Sylvia Plath, because she succinctly expresses my darkest fear: “what horrifies me most is the idea of being useless: well-educated, brilliantly promising, and fading out into an indifferent middle age”. As girls, we are told to ‘break the glass ceiling’, to be astronauts and world leaders, “well-educated and brilliantly promising”, which in turn cultivates a distinct fear of being unremarkable. What Girl, 1983 made clear to me was that this fear has an unspoken twin; to be remarkable is to be alone. To sit pretty and dumb, to “be the object, the centre, the focus of another’s desire” is a primal response to prospective loneliness, that sits uncomfortably alongside the unreasonable demand for exceptionality. A girl
longing to be wanted is deemed reductive and juvenile, as Ullmann learns, painfully, in 1983.
This theme of defining self-worth through the eyes of others is what I clung on to throughout this book. Ullmann holds as significant the first time “a man has looked at me and told me what he sees” and, later, decides to go model for a photographer in Paris against her mother’s wishes because, to a sixteen-year-old, that is the pinnacle of desirability. It translates as ‘yes, I’ve made it, a middle-aged man saw me in an elevator and thought me pretty enough to commit to memory’. It’s the Kate Moss experience desired secretly by teenage girls everywhere, a desire that is belittled in favour of the emotionally sterile ‘girl power’. In stark divergence to the ‘marry a rich man’ shtick I’m used to pedalling in exam season, it is now clear to me that to divorce female success from attractiveness entrenches the toxic way young women still view themselves. You can either be one, or the other, not both. Girl, 1983 exemplifies this conflict, by presenting the darkest outcomes of only valuing one facet of ourselves.
Ullmann explores the dichotomy further when pointing out its generational nature; as the daughter of Liv Ullmann, golden girl of European cinema and muse of Ingmar Bergmann, a natural hero worship ensues. Young Linn notices people turning to look at her mother walking down a street “in a red Dior suit from 1970, with shiny, shoulder length hair”. Her mother tarnishes the shine by saying “she’s always felt left out, bony, invisible. It’s hard to comprehend”. The women girls deem beautiful, like our mothers, face the same conflict. To be seen as beautiful, or to be seen as successful. To be chaotic and indecisive, or to be well-grounded and prepared.
Ullman is, towards the end of the book, reprimanded: “I imagined you’d be a girl who knew the difference between right and wrong”. There is no allowance for duality. Sensibility and foolishness exist on opposite sides of girlhood. Girl, 1983 is as much about the rage towards this inherent categorisation of identity as it is the men who perpetrate it.
In the end, the 1980s had little to no bearing on this book. There were also no conclusions drawn, no twists, no unexpected revelations. In it’s raw and fragmentary way, Girl, 1983 points out the relationship between beauty, shame, and power through the medium of remembering. I’m glad I met the girl from 1983; I like to think she’s taught me more about navigating girlhood in 2025, and hopefully given me the mindset to be a woman both successful and beautiful.
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