Here is a novel about getting your period. It also involves some jewelry theft and desecration of the Glorious Dead.
It’s 1923 and a single mother of five children gets so tired of their sass that she decides to take them to a First World War battlefield so they will be shamed into good behavior. Once in France she is bitten by a horse fly and nearly dies because before antibiotics everything was apparently serious. She spends the summer in hospital while her children run unsupervised around an elderly hotel that smells of “warm dust and cool plaster… Gaston the chef’s cooking, furniture polish, damp linen, and always a little of drains.” The hotel makes a business of the battlefields. They re-bury a soldier’s skull in the garden for the dogs to dig up before each group of tourists arrive, and make sure the machine gun holes are never painted over. Good behavior from the children does not markedly improve.
Instead they spend the summer exploring their budding sexuality (older children) and the greengage orchard (younger children). The oldest girl has a romance with someone who turns out to be a murderer and a diamond thief, which sounds about right for the judgement calls you make when you are 16. Our narrator, her 13 year old sister, is very jealous, through the thief kindly helps her getting her the female sanitary products she needs.
This also sounds wildly unbelievable as I write it, but was in fact based on the author’s own experience. What I really enjoyed about the book in fact was not so much the lurid plot, as the great charm of her vivid recollection of her siblings and the French countryside. It was somehow very sweetly melancholy as a bottled memory of a time and a place, that is now slipping out of human memory. Only the very oldest people still recall that summer of 1923, and it was touching to hear about it as we approach 2023.