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 psycho...