How to Make a Woman

An electrifying double narrative about young women’s lives and desires, from a leading voice of French contemporary literature.

It is—to start—the 1980s, in a small village in the French Basque Country. Rose and Solange are fifteen and have shared much of their childhood; 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 two young women.  Rose enters university in Bordeaux to study psychology, maintaining a relationship with her childhood sweetheart (with whom she is equivocally in love); Solange shakes off old attachments to pursue a life on the stage and in pulsing city centers.

In Bordeaux, Paris, and London, as they pass in and out of each other’s lives, each makes use of, and makes, the other in this bold new novel—brutal, exuberant, and radical—about “what is done to women in the world.”