Our Life in the Forest
Our Life in the Forest
Marie Darrieussecq
Translated from the French by Penny Hueston
In this darkly funny novel crossing the dystopian visions of Helen DeWitt and Kazuo Ishiguro, a woman writes from a forest encampment at the end of the world
I opened my eye and BANG, everything came into focus.
In the near future, our woman in the forest is nearing the end. She’s down an eye and a kidney; she’s lost the use of one hand; she knows she won’t have time to reread what she writes here. Her other half, Marie (a.k.a. Sissy)—around whom our narrator has unwisely constructed her identity, and whom she sacrificed a great deal to set free—is an idiot: deeply incurious, barely ambulatory, and horny. It’s hardly Marie’s fault (she’s a clone). But our half was hoping for more.
In a torrential narrative, with asides for barking laughter, our woman in the forest casts her single roving eye across the opaque mechanisms of their shared past and the strange world that made them (one that is nevertheless familiar in its vices)—driven to understand and communicate, in writing, her conditional personhood. Our Life in the Forest is an unrelenting novel about complicity, love, and the failing body: an irreverent and deeply compelling addition to the female apocalyptic tradition.
Praise for MARIE DARRIEUSSECQ and Our Life in the Forest
“Marie Darrieussecq courses through dark places with such buoyant energy that you emerge exhilarated.”—Helen Garner
“A burning intelligence.”—J.M. Coetzee
“In Marie Darrieussecq’s Our Life in the Forest everyone is split apart... The book isn’t asking what a body is for, or whether despite this rupture we’d even be able to consider ourselves human. Instead, it asks if humanity is material at all?”—Olivia Erlanger, Artforum
“Hypnotic.”—Le Monde
“Exceptional.”—L’Observateur
“Ingeniously and brilliantly, Marie Darrieussecq’s sparkling tale adds to the classics of futuristic fiction.”—Télérama
Product info
Publication Date: September 1, 2026
Fiction
Paperback | 5.25 x 8 | 136 pages
Rights: NA
9798893380750
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