How to Make a Woman

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."

Marie Darrieussecq's first book, Pig Tales, became an overnight sensation and bestseller, selling more than 300,000 copies and translated into more than thirty languages--since then, she has gone on to publish twenty more, including Being Here, a literary investigation into the life of the artist Paula Modersohn-Becker, and the novels Men, The Baby, and Our Life in the Forest. The New Yorker described her as France's "best young novelist," and she is recognized as one of the leading voices of French contemporary literature. Her novel Men was awarded the Prix Médicis and the Prix des Prix in 2013. Penny Hueston's translations from French include novels by Emmanuelle Salasc and Patrick Modiano and eight books by Marie Darrieussecq. She has been shortlisted for the JQ-Wingate Prize, the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation, twice for the Scott Moncrief Prize, and twice for the New South Wales Premier's Translation Prize, and she was the winner of the 2020 Medal for Excellence in Translation.