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."