Tell Me What You Love: On Marie Darrieussecq

---

“Tell me what you love, and I’ll tell you who you are.”

I read this quote somewhere back in college, but I lost its source. When I looked up the quote recently, the internet told me it came from Rumi, from Arsène Houssaye, from a traditional Creole proverb. The internet, hyper-saturated with potential sources, was paradoxically unable to offer any true home.

The quote wafted back into my mind a year ago when I first read Pig Tales by Marie Darrieussecq. Online, the book was described as “satire”, “Orwellian”, and “Kafka-esque”. “A novel of lust and transformation”, it said on the cover. Yet all of these superlatives felt crude and incomplete. They were simply words floating around with no container. To place the words “lust” and “transformation” next to each other implies that they belong to the same source. That an internal lust had caused an external transformation. In the novel, it is the lust of men that mutilates the woman, causing her to transform. Pig Tales is not merely about lust and transformation. It is about derangement after abuse, primordial rage, the survival of a female artist. The quote came back to me as I neared the end of the novel. The narrator jaunts through the forest mud in full pig form, finally free to please herself. “I write whenever my animal spirits subside a little,” she writes. Here, we understand what she loves.

So when Transit Books announced that they would publish two new translations of Marie Darrieussecq together on September 1, 2026, I read the descriptions with caution. My eyes glazed over the words “funny” and “dystopian” in the blurbs, wondering what the books would tell me about themselves. Our Life in the Forest and How to Make a Woman by Marie Darrieussecq (trans. Penny Hueston), explore questions about the construction of the self in a world that seeks to destroy existence, and the meaning of womanhood under regime. In How to Make a Woman, the regime is the heteropatriarchy, while in Our Life in the Forest, the regime is more overtly a hyper-surveillance state.

Darrieussecq writes on the tender, painful reality of being a woman, and dissects the politics that cause harm. Her wry humor reveals the absurdity of situations we take for granted, while her abundant imagination creates worlds that seem eerily on the horizon. Additionally, she is a trained psychoanalyst, and brings this sensitivity of the human psyche into her oeuvre, sometimes even writing characters who are therapists themselves (such as in Our Life in the Forest). She confronts head-on the harsh reality of womanhood, and yet we have chosen to reduce her work to one superlative at a time, considering only the humor, the setting, or the faint imprint of another on her work. It begs the question of what is lost when we do not interpret the work of a writer in its full complexity? What does this failure say about us? Perhaps the best way to understand our failure is to understand what we are offered.

In How to Make a Woman, we follow two teenage girls in the French Basque countryside as they come of age during the 1980s AIDS crisis. The novel opens with the perspective of Rose, who narrates the emotional unraveling of her friendship with Solange, whose unplanned pregnancy causes her to become increasingly unreliable. Rose feels trapped in her loneliness, and begins to play her sexual awakening like a chess match. There are winners and losers, and she plans to be a winner. Yet, Rose struggles to find her purpose. “Rose’s life is like any other, a life that, compared to Solange’s, is without incident, a life that meets expectations, a life that could seem boring if you considered its, let’s say, banal aspects. Nevertheless, Rose is more and more convinced in her heart that she has a destiny.” In some sense, it seems like purpose comes easily to Solange. Rose feels shame for Solange, and sometimes pity. Yet there is an undercurrent of jealousy that plagues the pages. It is clear that Solange’s desirability is a double-edged sword, and Rose feels an embedded sense of competition that bars her from being able to fully see the pain of her friend.

About halfway through the book, the novel changes to the perspective of Solange, and the story is told anew. Rather than a fickle, selfish person, we see Solange as a troubled teenager who has been denied the typical quandaries of teenage life. The pregnancy exiles her from a regular social life, but also from her dreams of acting. Solange recruits the help of her mother to confront their poverty, spending time applying for benefits and government assistance, rather than going to school. Then, there is the physical reality of childbirth. “Later, they tie her legs to the table. Wide open, she’s left to their mercy, they operate on her, between her legs, slicing, penetrating her, rummaging inside her.” What begins to emerge is the heartbreaking portrait of a child whose life has been violated in every conceivable way as she is forced into premature adulthood.

Why must the story be told from one woman, and then the other? Darrieussecq’s novel seems to suggest not only a fractured reality, but a multitudinal interpretation of narrative. It recalls the work of Shahrnush Parsipur, who similar to Darrieusecq, was also a writer and translator, a lifetime artist and staunch advocate for theocratic reform in Iran. Her work has come back into international focus with her book Women without Men being longlisted for the 2026 International Booker Prize, and her death in the same year.

Women Without Men, circles the stories of five women, capturing through each perspective the myriad ways that the Iranian regime has shaped women’s relationships to their bodies and sexuality. Beyond a preoccupation with virginity and a biblical sense of occasion asserted into otherwise ordinary scenes, How to Make a Woman recalls Women Without Men in its construction of a feminist narrative. In both books, the close third-person perspective is ingenious. It offers the reader the chance to see through the eyes of any given character, while also placing the reader at enough narrative distance to allow a view of the characters in relief of one another. From here, we understand not only that the story is composed of multiple narratives, but also in the space between the narratives. The story resides as much in the absence of understanding between characters as in their shared reality. In this way, the space between the perspectives of each woman becomes inherent to the interpretation of the text, which ultimately draws a portrait of womanhood without allowing us the ease of conflating any one woman with its stereotypes. Both books ask us to consider the priorities of each woman, and the ties between them that are impossible to sever.

And what of Our Life in the Forest? This novel features an urgent, first-person narration that barrels toward an impending apocalypse. Marie, fugitive name Viviane, is running out of time. She must write down her story imminently, before her body gives out on her or she is captured. Before she went to the forest, Marie was a trauma therapist in a surveillance society obsessed with optimizing technology. One of the advancements of her time is the availability of “halves,” or biological clones kept in a permanent state of deep sleep to allow them to be harvested for organs and body parts as needed. Marie has joined a fugitive group with a moral and political conscience. They are not defecting merely for their freedom, but to make a statement on what a person is. They will gather with their childlike, developmentally stunted “halves” in the forest, and teach them how to be a person. “I think it’s hard to love someone who has a half. Who the hell knows what he’s done with his half?” says Marie, speaking on the evil of claiming ownership over another person, of seeing them as extractible, and dispensible. The rescuing of halves can be seen not only as a conscious de-coupling, but a condemnation of extractive economies, of replaceability, of authoritarian control in exchange for safety. This rebellion will kill them, almost definitely, but Marie is writing down the story to capture an unassailable account of history, to resist the narrative of a regime that will inevitably demonize them.

What Women Without Men offers for interpretation is less obvious here, until we understand how both books explore the characterization of bodies under regime. In Our Life in the Forest, bodies are extracted for organs and limbs, which is a heightened version of the extraction we see in Women Without Men, when Fa’iza and Munis, both virgins, are raped on the side of the road by two men in a truck. Here, we see their bodies are simply vessels of pleasure for these men. “In a deserted stretch of the Karadj highway Munis had come face-to-face with unbridled lust…The problem was that she had an unbounded awareness of things…” Both books explore what it is to possess a discardable body and the power dynamics inherent to determining sentience. In doing so, both books make a movement toward life, even in a body soon-to-be pronounced dead, whether by extractive government policies, or by de facto practices that place a woman’s value on her virginity.

By reading through the lens of Parsipour, it becomes clear what becomes lost in our failure to read as deeply as Darrieussecq writes. Toward the end of Our Life in the Forest, Marie (the character, not author) writes: “I would like you, please, to read this as a prayer…” These final lines offer a spiritual intimation of life, even for one forced to live in the rubble. We see the necessity of record and truth to subvert erasure, even in a hypersurveillance state. It is the story, the way it is told, and the fact that it is told, that allows us to reclaim our humanity. By reading Marie Darrieussecq, we find a path toward the gateway of witness during atrocity.