The Girl: A Life in the Shadow of Roman Polanski

Over thirty years after she had sexual relations with Roman Polanski as a thirteen-year-old, Samantha Geimer finally releases her tell-all memoir, an astonishingly well-written, engaging book that is admirably subtle in its depiction of events. In 1977, when she met Polanski, Geimer was, by her own description, a "thirteen-year-old kid in jeans and sneakers, barely developed," living with her mother and her stepfather in the San Fernando Valley and half-heartedly pursuing an acting career. Polanski, a friend of a friend of Geimer's older sister, came to her house to take some tests shots for a Vogue Paris story "on the differences between American girls and French girls," which the magazine later denied it had commissioned. Then came the photo-shoot, which famously took place at Jack Nicholson's house. Geimer recalls the events that took place with explicit yet straight-forward detail. Her prose is lucid and compelling. The memoir, which winds its way through the painful vilification of her mother by the press, and a spectacular failure of the legal system, is masterfully clear-eyed. (Sept.)