How to Make a Woman

Rose tries to appeal to Solange. ‘You and I are alike,’ she says.

‘We might have been alike when we were little, but the truth is that we’re not at all the same.’

Rose, a psychotherapist, and Solange, an actress, are very different, one diligent and loyal, the other rebellious and self-centred, but they have been best friends forever, despite their contrasting social backgrounds. In How to Make a Woman, we follow the young women’s experiences of adolescence, love, sex, work and motherhood, as they negotiate their place in the world.

This lively portrait of female friendship, of two identities under construction, of ‘what gets done to women’, is also a snapshot of French provincial life in the eighties and nineties. Written with humour and heart, How to Make a Woman is another sparkling novel by one of France’s most renowned contemporary writers.

Marie Darrieussecq was born in Bayonne in 1969. Her first novel, Pig Tales, was translated into thirty-five languages. She has published more than twenty books and been awarded numerous prizes. Text has published Tom Is Dead, All the Way, Men, Being Here: The Life of Paula Modersohn-Becker, Our Life in the Forest, The Baby, Crossed Lines, Sleepless and How to Make a Woman. Darrieussecq has written art criticism and journalism, is a translator from English and has practised as a psychoanalyst. She lives in Paris.

Penny Hueston’s translations from French include novels by Emmanuelle Salasc, Patrick Modiano, Sarah Cohen-Scali and Raphaël Jerusalmy. She has translated eight books by Marie Darrieussecq and 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. She was the winner of the 2020 Medal for Excellence in Translation.

‘It’s impossible to stop turning these pages…profoundly original.’ Libération

‘Darrieussecq’s prose is immediate, lively and unforced, a tour de force.’ Le Figaro littéraire

‘Shows us the price women pay to become what is expected of them.’ Swiss Broadcasting Corporation