How to Make a Woman, the latest work from acclaimed French novelist and former psychoanalyst Marie Darrieussecq, is the story of Rose and Solange, two childhood best friends figuring out their lives and desires in a small Basque village community in the 1980s, where patriarchal views dominate. Rose opts to stay with her teenage boyfriend, Christian, and ventures to Bordeaux to study psychology and later to Paris. Solange, a teen mother, also ditches their village for Bordeaux – then Paris, London and Los Angeles – in her bid to become an actress.
Tracing the women’s intermittently intersecting lives across the final decades of the 20th century, the book unfolds as a double narrative that explores their two different perspectives before finally bringing them together at its close. It is a bold and sometimes savage study of female friendship, while its specificities of time and place paint a vivid picture of coming of age in the French Basque Country and the shifting world that lay beyond it.
Darrieussecq joins our interview over video call from her old family home in the Basque Country, where she spends her summers surrounded by family members. She is animated and enthusiastic, slipping between French and English to make her points. How to Make a Woman’s protagonists, Rose and Solange, exist within a world of characters that Darrieussecq revisits across many of her novels – as she puts it, “they are me. I was Rose and Solange. Even if it’s fiction, I was both of them.”
Here, the author discusses the importance of writing about the Basque Country, writing men as secondary characters, and the feminist reasoning behind her decision to begin the book in the 1980s.
Jemima Skala: How did you decide to split the narrative into two halves between Rose and Solange’s two perspectives?
Marie Darrieussecq: I wanted to give the reader space and allow them to have a notion of what’s happening, and then the second notion, and make up their own mind. I started by writing Solange because Solange was easier. So many things happen to her and it’s so funky, so sexy, so glamorous – so violent, also. I had a lot of pleasure writing Solange, but when I wrote the birth part, my belly really ached. When you read it, it’s terrible. So then I wrote Rose, and of course Rose’s life is more boring, but I didn’t want the reader to feel bored so I suddenly realised I had to give her a chance to be as interesting, smart and perhaps sexy as Solange.
JS: The girls are friends and call themselves best friends but there’s such an inequality with how they think about each other.
MD: I wanted to write friendship as two movies happening together but never really crossing. And also about the very big misunderstanding that is at the core of friendship, of real, long-lasting friendships. The misunderstanding is a very strong, solid link between two people because you spend your entire life trying to understand, to get rid of the misunderstanding but you can’t. Rose and Solange don’t really understand each other but I think they really love each other in a very archaic childhood way. I checked at the end of writing: I typed ‘Rose’ into Solange’s part and she appears four times. I typed ‘Solange’ into Rose’s part and she appears 180 times. So: Rose is obsessed by Solange and Solange uses Rose when she needs her. We all have that sort of friend who calls you at 2am when she’s in a bad situation, but she’s also so interesting and she will be there for life. That’s the way Solange loves Rose, but she does love Rose.
JS: Why was the 1980s such a potent inspiration for this novel?
MD: I’m a feminist. I’m 57, so I’ve lived at least three phases of feminism. I wanted to settle my little characters in the dark ages: after the sexual liberation. The 80s were also the moment right before HIV; then, you were supposed to have sex, to be a virgin at 15 or 16 was like you were ridiculous. So we took a lot of risks; I’m not even talking about HIV. We girls didn’t know what our own desires were and we had so much pressure from men and boys that we had sex much too soon. We overshot our own desires and men took advantage of us. I wanted to be a witness in this book to the moral mess, the sexual mess.
Street harassment didn’t exist in the 80s, the name or concept. It was a state of nature. Men were like that; we had to adapt. My novels are about that and this one especially. We are made of that. Les femmes sont fabriquées de ça, les hommes ne sont pas fabriqués de ça. Ils sont fabriqués autrement. You know, Simone de Beauvoir, ‘one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.’ I’m a proud heir of Simone de Beauvoir, but I have the feeling that, yes I became a woman, but I was knocked together like Frankenstein. So I have this impression that my legs are not exactly the right size, my arms are weird. Walking in the street when you’re 17, you are like Frankenstein. You don’t know what to do with your hands, your eyes, your face. I thought it was me, that I was awkward, but no, I was made awkward and self-conscious and embarrassed by my own body. Now, it’s a bit late, but I’m very proud and satisfied with my body.
“Except for Madame Bovary, women were always secondary characters in literature” – Marie Darrieussecq
JS: How did you give your male characters such specificity, even though they feel like secondary characters?
MD: All of the men who appear in the book are memories. All of them! I knew Christian. I knew Brice – Brice is made of two people that were very dear to me. Marcos, the guy who said the same sentence to both Rose and Solange when he has sex with them? I know him! And it was that exact sentence, so it’s revenge [laughs]. It was years ago. But yes, I knew them all.
Except for Madame Bovary, women were always secondary characters in literature. I’ve always written female characters who have this powerful sexual curiosity, a powerful desire, and Christian in particular gave me the opportunity to write about the boys who were crushed by so-called sexual liberation. Christian is just this sweet person, he’s a poet. He’s somebody who’s going to become an alcoholic because he’s so unsatisfied with life, and so much in love with Rose that he cannot have her, in a way. I love Christian.
JS: As anglophone readers, a lot of the French translated literature that we get is of Paris or metropolitan centres but these girls are so Basque and that’s clearly an important part of your writing too.
MD: When I grew up here in the Basque Country, I was convinced that I had to invent other places, more glamorous ones than this rural, stupid birthplace. And of course, I slowly discovered that it was very precious to me. When I grew up here, I was obsessed with – we call it monter à Paris, climbing up to Paris – but first Bordeaux. Bordeaux was the place where good pupils, like I was, could study.
All of my novels are concerned with the border. It’s very rich for a writer to be born in a place that has so much to give and so much to be discovered in a way that isn’t touristy, in a romanesque, novelistic way. I became very convinced that my little characters had a lot to give. I really love them. And Christian is born in a Basque-speaking family where the political question of independence was very serious and could push some boys – never girls – to take arms. That’s always something that’s there in my novels. It’s in the background, it’s my biotope, all these political questions. And actually, seen from Paris, it doesn’t exist. I want to make these things exist because they do exist, even if it’s not a major theme of the novel. The geography of the novel is always my geography. My novels are settled there.
How to Make a Woman is published by Fitzcarraldo on 13 August.