Prune Antoine - Villa Albertine

Literature

Houston

“A film or a dream, that’s America. Something that isn’t real. And what better inspiration?”

Born in France in 1981, I grew up in Europe and have been based in Berlin since 2008. I write both fiction and non-fiction. I have primarily focused on the post-Soviet world and the consequences of recent conflicts, particularly on women. Villa Albertine represents a unique opportunity to continue my work on a subject that fascinates me: gender biases in psychiatry.

Prune Antoine is an independent journalist and novelist. Her reports have been published by major media outlets and have been shortlisted for the European Press Prize, the True Story Award, and the Franco-German Journalism Prize.

She has investigated numerous topics at the intersection of international relations, politics, and society. L’Heure d’été (2019), a finalist for the Goncourt First Novel Prize, explores the hopes of a Millennial couple in Berlin grappling with precariousness, gentrification, and free love in Europe on the brink of an implosion. More recently, La mère diabolique (2024) examines the ambivalences of motherhood and revisits the criminal case of Christiane K.

She has been awarded the Milena Jesenska Fellowship at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna and was a guest journalist at the Max Planck Institute for International Law in Heidelberg.

What?

It was while preparing La mère diabolique that I began to take an interest in gender biases in criminal justice and psychiatry. I sought to understand how women are judged, assessed, and evaluated. In the fall of 2023, I received a research grant from the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna to work on women and psychiatry. What criteria are used to assess female psychiatric disorders? Are they fair? Appropriate? How about treatments? That’s when I discovered reproductive psychiatry.

In the United States, it is a recent and rapidly growing medical discipline focusing on the links between the menstrual cycle, hormonal changes, and psychiatry. There are therapists, academic programs, and specialized psychiatric units. In Europe, we have barely heard of it.

Hence, the question I would like to explore in a new literary non-fiction project is: Could reproductive psychiatry revolutionize the mental health care of women (which has been in free fall since the pandemic)? Why? How?

My idea is to immerse myself in a clinic for several weeks and observe what happens there: What are these women suffering from mental distress also telling us about America? It is no coincidence that I want to carry out this project in one of the most conservative states in the U.S., Texas; I want to understand how much politics influences the lives of women and their most intimate stories. We already see how the conservative agenda affects women’s rights, such as with the ban on access to abortion.

Where?

My relationship with America is contradictory: I feel most European when I’m in the United States. What I love about the U.S. is the excess, the absence of limits, the space. I remember a road trip between Silicon Valley and Las Vegas in an old car that broke down in the middle of nowhere, the dusty gas station, the drawling accent of the attendant, the heat on the pavement—a true cliché, yes, but I already felt like I was in a movie. A movie or a dream, that’s America. Something that’s not real. And what better inspiration?

I wanted to experience a slower, less polished pulse than the East and West Coasts I’ve already explored—something rawer, tougher, perhaps more authentic. I know nothing about Texas except for this idea of deep America, the cowboy and rodeo culture, and I am excited to discover it through women. I have found a clinic in Houston, the Women’s Pavilion, and I would obviously like to meet psychiatrists, nurses, and patients, and perhaps spend some time with them at home, in their family settings. I also plan to explore smaller places in the broader South.

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