How to Make a Woman
How to Make a Woman
Marie Darrieussecq
Translated from the French by Penny Hueston
Funny, brutal, and “profoundly original” (Libération)—an electrifying double narrative about the creative and destructive potential of friendship between women, from one of the most surprising and prolific voices in French literature.
It is—to start—the 1980s, in a small village in the French Basque Country. Rose and Solange are fifteen and have been friends forever; only now Solange is pregnant.
A novel in two irreducible parts, How to Make a Woman narrates, in Marie Darrieussecq’s relentless prose, the coming-of-age of these two young women against the backdrop of the final decades of the twentieth century: scenes and subcultures, the AIDS epidemic, the end of history. Rose goes to nearby Bordeaux to study psychology, maintaining an equivocal relationship with her childhood sweetheart; Solange shakes off old attachments to pursue a life on the stage and in pulsing city centers.
In Bordeaux, Paris, London, and Hollywood, as they pass in and out of each other’s lives, each makes use of, and makes, the other in this bold novel—mischievous, exuberant, and radical—about sexuality, self-knowledge, and "what is done to women in the world."
Praise for HOW TO MAKE A WOMAN
"Earthy and absorbing, with a sense of infectious intimacy... Susan Sontag once wrote: 'To be a woman is to be an actress. Being feminine is a kind of theatre.' In How to Make a Woman Marie Darrieussecq explores this proposition, pulling back the curtain on the charades of femininity with clarity and empathy.'"—Times Literary Supplement
"A lucid, clear-eyed and strangely comforting novel about the paths two friends take away from each other."—Amina Cain, author of Indelicacy and A Horse at Night
"A memorable feminist meditation on friendship, chosen family, and making one’s own way in the world."—Publishers Weekly
"I read this novel fast, I love how it moves swiftly through a decade of life. It made me think about time and how we spend it, about being a girl, and about the different ways two people experience the same moment. It also has the truest childbirth scene I’ve ever read, and a glimpse of Prince."—Daisy Hildyard, author of Emergency
"Intelligent, insightful, mischievous and tender."—Miriam Bridenne, Albertine
Praise for marie darrieussecq
"Marie Darrieussecq courses through dark places with such buoyant energy that you emerge exhilarated."—Helen Garner
"A burning intelligence."—J.M. Coetzee
"The internationally celebrated author who illuminates those parts of life other writers cannot or do not want to reach."—The Independent
"‘Darrieussecq is one of the most prolific and distinguished living writers in France with a truly impressive body of work."—Samantha Harvey, The Guardian
PRODUCT INFO
Publication Date: September 1, 2026
Fiction
Paperback | 5.25 x 8 | 244 pages
Rights: NA
9798893380705