I decided to look up the author, as I do with most of what I read, and was surprised to find that Françoise Sagan was only 18 years old when she published Bonjour Tristesse. Also that it was her first novel and is her most popular novel ever published. This was inspiring to find. That one could have such a lasting effect with their writing, even if it was their first and only at the age of 18. Here we are in 2022, 68 years after Bonjour Tristesse‘s publication, and continuing to derive meaning from it.

Now, although I bring up the fact that memory appears to be a theme of Romantic writing, at least based off of the reading list we have access to, I have just recently discovered that it is not coincidental. It was gently calculated (haha) by Jon, our professor. It just so happens by chance that we have encountered many texts in reference to memory or reminiscing or past experience. However, this will not prevent me from making these types of connections from text to text.

Specifically, the main character being a young woman and the idea of moving, introduced early on in the novel, reminded me of Nada by Carmen Laforet, which I read last week. Laforet’s novel also followed a similar theme of memory. These texts were also similar in the modern aspect of them, for which they confronted concepts that teenagers should not, but often do, have to deal with. For example, in Nada the chaos inside of her house and problems from her family intertwining with her life and in Bonjour Tristesse, Raymond’s personal life with his mistress, Elsa, intertwining with Cécile’s thoughts and uncertainty of her and whether she was threatening to their father-daughter relationship. Additionally, Laforet’s novel involved sexual themes like Sagan’s, exploring language that can be seen as support for sexual liberation – something that may have been looked down upon in that day and age, of when Bonjour Tristesse and Nada were published. These novels are great at exploring modernity and push to dive into themes like sexuality, teenage thoughts, empowerment of women, and more – so much like what we see today.

With this I would like to ask, could you personally see yourself expressing these intense themes with the public eye watching over you? The first thing that comes to mind is age, the fact that Sagan was only 18 when she published this novel shows the true confidence and comfortability she had within herself. I feel as if I already express intense themes as such, with my music – through lyrics – figurative speech – explicit language. Just not caring about what an outsider would have to say, but that’s just me.