Releasing the past

Bloom: Letters on Girlhood
by Claire Sicherman and Nicole Breit

Qualicum Beach: Caitlin Press, 2025
$25  /  9781773861692

Reviewed by Selena Mercuri

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It takes courage to revisit the girl you used to be—not the sanitized, nostalgic version of her, but the real one: confused, body-conscious, awkward, ashamed. Bloom: Letters on Girlhood, the memoir-in-letters by Claire Sicherman and Nicole Breit, does exactly that. Two women. Two voices. One conversation conducted across more than two years of correspondence, about what it meant (and what it cost) to grow up female in the suburbs of late 1980s Vancouver.

Sicherman and Breit use the epistolary form with such organic intimacy that it feels like a natural extension of who they are together—two writers who happen to be friends, thinking out loud to each other on the page. The letters accumulate gradually, moving through subjects that might seem deceptively small on the surface: first bras, body hair, menstruation, crushes, the complicated social hierarchies of adolescence. But the genius of Bloom is in its depth of field. These intimate, sometimes humorous, sometimes raw dispatches are also an excavation. By the time you have read a few dozen of them, you understand that the book is not just about being a teenager. It is about the layered damage of being taught, systematically and relentlessly, to take up less space.

Both authors bring distinct and complementary perspectives to the correspondence. Sicherman, whose debut memoir Imprint: A Memoir of Trauma in the Third Generation examined inherited trauma through her Jewish family’s history as descendants of Holocaust survivors, brings to Bloom a characteristic attentiveness to how the past lodges itself in the body and travels across generations. Her letters tend toward introspection and a sort of forensic tenderness—she is always tracing the line between the girl she was and the woman and mother she became, trying to understand what was passed down to her without her consent. In one letter, she recalls watching her high school friends make out in hallways and wind up with mono, and reflects that even without any desire to participate, she still felt the sting of apparent exclusion: the absence of a boyfriend, she writes, made her feel like something was wrong with her. It is a small, acutely observed moment, but it captures the way adolescent social scripts can make a girl pathologize her own perfectly ordinary instincts.

Breit, an award-winning poet and essayist who identifies as queer and neurodivergent, brings a nuanced sensitivity to the experience of growing up without adequate language for one’s own desires and identity. Her letters exhibit an awareness of what it means to be on the margins of what the world expects you to be, and of the shame that descends when you cannot yet articulate why you feel like an outsider. In one affecting passage, she describes the only person who ever tried to explain arousal or pleasure to her being her cousin, who arrived one summer night bearing knowledge Breit was both grateful for and bewildered by. “I wasn’t exactly sure how she had learned all this and I was afraid to ask,” Breit writes. “I was three months older than she was and felt silly next to her.” The scene is comic and heartbreaking in equal measure and functions as a reminder of how randomly and inadequately girls have historically been initiated into any understanding of their own bodies and desires.

The book’s power lies in the dialogue between Sicherman and Breit, the way one woman’s revelation draws out an answering truth from the other, the way a memory shared in confidence becomes a mirror in which the reader suddenly recognizes herself. This is a text about the ordinary experience of growing up female, rendered extraordinary by the quality of attention brought to it.

Sicherman and Breit are writing from mid-life, and the retrospective view they bring is crucial to the book’s structure and its argument. The distance between then and now is what allows them to see clearly enough to name the patriarchy and the misogyny that shaped their experiences in ways they could not have articulated at thirteen or sixteen. The book moves fluidly between past and present, between the girl each woman was and the woman she is now, and this dual temporality gives Bloom its unusual emotional richness.

Some of the book’s most arresting passages deal with the body, and specifically with the complicated, often shame-filled relationship girls are taught to have with their changing bodies. Sicherman and Breit write about menstruation, physical development, and sexuality with a candor that still feels, in 2025, slightly radical. These are topics that have historically been discussed behind closed doors, if at all, and the authors’ willingness to write about them with both honesty and dignity is significant. They are sitting down to say: this happened, and it mattered, and the silence around it was not neutral. The silence was its own kind of message, and they received it loud and clear.

The treatment of desire and sexuality is especially nuanced. Breit’s exploration of her own queerness—the gradual, uncertain process of understanding an identity she had no roadmap for in the late eighties—is handled with care. She neither overdramatizes the difficulty nor smooths it away into a tidy coming-out narrative. In a letter that arrives with a sense of being long-deferred, she admits that she didn’t come out to herself until her first few years of college, and that she had been putting off writing about it in their correspondence because she assumed the book was meant to touch on experiences they shared in common. “Part of being queer,” she writes, “is knowing, all the time, that you are in the minority—often the only (out) person in the room.” This line alone illuminates something that runs beneath the entire project: the question of whose girlhood gets to be universal, and whose must always be explained or ignored. And Sicherman, writing from a straight perspective, is a generous and curious interlocutor; she does not centre herself in Breit’s story, but she engages with it thoughtfully, examining her own assumptions in the process. The fact that one author is straight and one is queer, one is Jewish and a descendant of survivors, one is neurodivergent—these differences enrich the conversation rather than fracturing it. The book argues, implicitly but powerfully, that women’s stories exist in relation to one another, and that the act of bearing witness to a friend’s experience is itself a form of feminism.

There is also considerable humour in Bloom, which is one of its great strengths. Sicherman and Breit are funny writers, and the book is not afraid to laugh at the absurdity of adolescence even while taking its pain seriously. This tonal balance is difficult to achieve and they manage it with considerable skill. The humour never trivializes; it comes from recognition, from the relief of finally being able to say: yes, that was ridiculous, and yes, it also hurt.

If the book has a weakness, it is occasionally in its pacing. The epistolary structure, for all its intimacy, can at times feel circular—the authors returning to familiar themes and emotional registers in ways that feel slightly repetitive rather than deepening. But this is a minor criticism of what is, overall, a remarkably cohesive and affecting work.

Bloom was selected as one of CBC’s 45 must-read books, and it is easy to understand why. It arrives at a cultural moment when conversations about girlhood, bodily autonomy, and the long reach of patriarchal conditioning feel more urgent than ever. The book is not a self-help guide, though it may well help. What it offers is the feeling of being accompanied, of having your experience reflected back to you with intelligence, warmth, and humour.

Bloom: Letters on Girlhood is the kind of book that will find its way into many hands—gifted by daughters to mothers, by mothers to daughters, passed between friends with dog-eared pages and underlined passages. Claire Sicherman and Nicole Breit have written a book that is, in every sense, alive to itself. It does exactly what the best memoir does: it makes you feel less alone.

[Editor’s Note: Claire Sicherman will speak at the Jewish Book Festival at an event titled Young Women at Crossroads, February 24th, 2026 at 7PM at the Jewish Community Centre in Vancouver.]

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Selena Mercuri is Reviews Editor at The New Quarterly, a publicist at River Street, and a social media associate at The Rights Factory. Her writing has appeared in The Fiddlehead, Literary Review of Canada, Prairie Fire, and The Ampersand Review, among others. She received the 2023 Norma Epstein Foundation Award for Creative Writing and is currently an MFA candidate in Creative Writing at the University of Guelph. Find her on Instagram: @selenamercuriwriter. [Editor’s Note: Selena Mercuri has reviewed books by JJ Lee (ed.), Shani Mootoo, Sarah Louise Butler and Diana Stevan for The British Columbia Review.]

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The British Columbia Review

Interim Editors, 2023-26: Trevor Marc Hughes (non-fiction), Brett Josef Grubisic (fiction)
Publisher: Richard Mackie

Formerly The Ormsby Review, The British Columbia Review is an on-line book review and journal service for BC writers and readers. The Advisory Board now consists of Jean Barman, Wade Davis, Robin Fisher, Barry Gough, Hugh Johnston, Kathy Mezei, Patricia Roy, and Graeme Wynn. Provincial Government Patron (since September 2018): Creative BC. Honorary Patron: Yosef Wosk. Scholarly Patron: SFU Graduate Liberal Studies. The British Columbia Review was founded in 2016 by Richard Mackie and Alan Twigg.

“Only connect.” – E.M. Forster