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cruelty), and through this protectiveness the identities of the mother, and her mother, and her mother and the Girl, and her daughter, and her daughter. Implicated in this merging as readers; having been addressed as ‘you’ throughout, it is hard to escape thinking about ourselves in the Girl’s place, the imposition of authority as we’ve experienced it, as imposed by our own parents, the ways these impositions can both protect and limit us. There is an anxious even urgent quality to the writing ‘ its nervousness rooted in doubts about the assumptions on which the instructions depend (assumptions about gender roles and division of labor, courtship, social appropriateness, and most severely/menacingly sexual identity, i.e. ‘like the slut I have warned you against becoming’ ‘ ‘you are not a boy, you know’ .. ‘the kind of woman the baker won’t let near the bread’). We are addressed directly ‘ you you you.

But then someone speaks on our behalf, a small voice: but I don’t sing benna on Sundays, what if the baker won’t let me feel the bread? ‘Girl’ is written in a verbal style as dialogue / monologue / performance. The writing has force, feels urgent, the stakes feel high as if there are consequences for not following instructions, although we are not told what the consequences might be. The audience extends beyond the story’s immediate horizon ‘ beyond the narrator/author’s relationship with her daughter to anyone who has been a daughter or had a daughter, perhaps to anyone who was raised by their mother. The writing reads like a declaration, but what exactly is being declared is more ambiguous: a declaration of love for certain, of the difficult labors of women, of the troubled complexities of navigating social worlds as a girl/woman, of the damning limitations put on girls, of the ways these limitations are passed down generation by generation, of the complexity of our relationships with our mothers, of the ways we recreate our parents in our relationships with our children. The voice is stern and commanding, brooking no backtalk. B