How to Make a Woman
Marie Darrieussecq author Penny Hueston translator
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Fitzcarraldo Editions
Publishing:13th Aug '26
£14.99
This title is due to be published on 13th August, and will be despatched as soon as possible.
Rose and Solange are lifelong friends, growing up together in 1980s France. Their paths are intertwined, yet they enter adulthood on radically different paths: Rose, who prizes stability above all else, studies psychology and marries her first love, Christian; Solange has numerous affairs, becomes pregnant at fifteen, gives birth to a baby boy, and pursues an acting career. Each tries to find her own happiness, her own sense of meaning, while navigating a world which seeks to establish binary ideas of what a woman can be. How to Make a Woman is a bold, sometimes brutal, coming-of-age novel from the award-winning novelist Marie Darrieussecq.
‘Darrieussecq is one of the most prolific and distinguished living writers in France with a truly impressive body of work.’
— Samantha Harvey, Guardian
‘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.’
— Alice Blackhurst, Times Literary Supplement
‘How to Make a Woman is so addictive that the temptation to read it in one sitting is strong, though slow readers might be even more rewarded. Would you risk missing how gracefully Marie Darrieussecq embeds Solange’s and Rose’s personal narratives into the transformations of French society at the turn of the twenty-first century ? How subtly she weaves together their shifting point of views? And how powerfully she questions the construction of masculinity and femininity in her era? How to Make a Woman is all at once intelligent, insightful, mischievous and tender.’
— Albertine
ISBN: 9781804272695
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: unknown
320 pages