Literature, Language, & Women’s Experiences: Marie Darrieussecq presents two newly translated books in the Bay and Seattle this November.

Villa Albertine San Francisco invites audiences to discover the work of Marie Darrieussecq, acclaimed French novelist and former Villa Albertine resident in Los Angeles, during a series of events celebrating the recent English-language publications of How to Make a Woman and Our Life in the Forest, both published by Transit Books. 

A writer, translator of James Baldwin’s essays, and former psychoanalyst, Darrieussecq has developed a distinctive literary practice that examines the relationship between language and lived experience. Her writing interrogates familiar expressions and social conventions, revealing how language both reflects and shapes our understanding of the world. Characterized by a precise, minimalist style, her work moves between the intimate and the political, drawing on scientific, geographical, and physical imagery to explore the complexities of identity, embodiment, and human relationships. 

Darrieussecq first came to international attention with her debut novel, Pig Tales (Truismes), published in 1996. The provocative story of a woman who gradually transforms into a pig became an international bestseller, translated into more than thirty languages. Since then, she has published more than twenty works, including novels, essays, children’s books, and biographies. Her novel Men (Tom est mort) received the Prix Médicis, and her work has established her as one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary French literature. 

Join Marie Darrieussecq in conversation with writers, publishers, and readers across the Bay Area to explore her literary universe and the questions at the heart of her work. 

Transit Books Club Salon 
Transit Books 
Tuesday, November 17, 6:30 pm 
 
For the fourth edition of its Transit Book Club Salon, Transit Books welcomes Marie Darrieussecq and publisher Adam Levy for an intimate discussion of her two newly translated novels, How to Make a Woman and Our Life in the Forest. The conversation will offer readers an opportunity to explore the creative processes, ideas, and literary questions behind these two works. 

Learn more and register here. 

Truisms, Fiction and Women Writing: A lunch workshop with author Marie Darrieussecq  
Stanford University 
Wednesday, November 18, 12:15 pm 
 
The French and Italian Department and the French Speaking Worlds: Here and Now initiative invite students, faculty, and the wider community to a lunchtime workshop with Marie Darrieussecq. Drawing on her extensive literary work, the discussion will examine the unspoken boundaries of language and the representation of the female body, offering an opportunity to engage with the author’s distinctive approach to fiction and contemporary women’s writing. 

Learn more and register here.

Marie Darrieussecq in Conversation with Rita Bullwinkel 
City Lights Bookstore 
Wednesday, November 18, 7 pm 
 
City Lights Bookstore and Transit Books present Marie Darrieussecq in conversation with Rita Bullwinkel, award-winning author of Headshot (2024) and Belly Up (2022), Editor at Large for McSweeney’s, and Assistant Professor of English at the University of San Francisco. Together, they will discuss Darrieussecq’s literary career and the publication of her two novels in English, exploring questions of language, identity, and the possibilities of contemporary fiction. 

Learn more and register here. 

Recontre littéraire avec Marie Darrieussecq 
Alliance Française de Seattle 
Saturday, November 21^st, 5pm 
Language: French 
 
The Alliance Française de Seattle welcomes Marie Darrieussecq for a special literary encounter featuring a conversation and readings from two of her novels, Notre vie dans les forêts (Our Life in the Forest) and Fabriquer une femme (How to Make a Woman). The discussion will be moderated by Otilia Baraboi, Executive Director of the Alliance Française de Seattle, and followed by an audience Q&A and book signing. English translations of both novels will be available for purchase. 

Learn more and register here.

About the works:  

Fabriquer une Femme (2024)  | How to Make a Woman (2026) 

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.” 

Notre vie dans les forets (2017)  | About Our Life in the Forest (2026) 

In the near future, our woman in the forest is nearing the end. She’s down an eye and a kidney; she’s lost the use of one hand; she knows she won’t have time to reread what she writes here. Her other half, Marie (a.k.a. Sissy)—around whom our narrator has unwisely constructed her identity, and whom she sacrificed a great deal to set free—is an idiot: deeply incurious, barely ambulatory, and horny. It’s hardly Marie’s fault (she’s a clone). But our half was hoping for more. 

In a torrential narrative, with asides for barking laughter, our woman in the forest casts her single roving eye across the opaque mechanisms of their shared past and the strange world that made them (one that is nevertheless familiar in its vices)—driven to understand and communicate, in writing, her conditional personhood. Our Life in the Forest is an unrelenting novel about complicity, love, and the failing body: an irreverent and deeply compelling addition to the female apocalyptic tradition.