A Respectable Occupation

''The best early training for a writer is an unhappy childhood,'' Hemingway famously said. Julia Kerninon, one of France''s most acclaimed young novelists, tells an altogether different story in a poetic account of her pursuit. Her journey through her formative years entwines the French and Anglo-Saxon literary traditions, resulting in a vibrant ode to reading, and to writing as a space for discovery (as well as a ''respectable occupation''), peppered with portraits of her disjointed yet loving family. From her native Brittany to the city of Shakespeare and Company, to a seaside cafe on the Atlantic coast, to Budapest and back, the author conjures a fluid, feminine answer to A Moveable Feast.