I regret throwing away the diaries I scribbled in when I was a teenager. I would be curious to rediscover the young girl I once was. What were my dreams, my fears, my crushes, the secrets that I shared with my best friends?
I only have a vague memory of those years left, but reading Marie Darrieussecq’s latest novel took me back to this period of transition where, as Simone de Beauvoir says so well, “one becomes a woman”, shaped by the society around us. Based on the characters of Rose and Solange that we discovered in Cleves (novel published in 2011), Darrieussecq recounts the youth of two young girls in the Basque Country in the 1980s. Like the author, Rose, the narrator, leaves her village to pursue studies in psychology in the big city. Coming from a bourgeois background, she is the wiser of the two, the one who maintains a long relationship with her childhood sweetheart, who is close to her parents, who moves forward in life with caution. Solange is the daring, slightly delinquent friend. She is an actress and travels the planet: Los Angeles, Paris, London. She’s the girl to whom impossible things happen, who receives slaps on the face and who gets back up. Solange has a life that is both difficult and exciting.
Darrieussecq makes the two friends evolve in parallel, with their meeting points and their distances. A friendship less intense than that of Lenu and Lila in The wonderful friend by Elena Ferrante, but just as founding.
The author very accurately describes the anxieties and joys of young people, their first sexual experiences, the nights spent dancing in trendy bars, with the impression that the night belongs to them. His novel rings true, thanks among other things to the many details (the objects, the fashion, the music) which take us back to the 1980s.
The references may well be French (the young people went out to Les Bains in Paris rather than Business or Le Passeport in Montreal), but we find ourselves there.
Reading this book, we say to ourselves that Marie Darrieussecq did not betray the young girl she was. She approaches the themes of her novel with finesse and empathy, and casts a caring eye on her characters. We end this reading with great tenderness for the young girl we once were.
A beautiful novel that will touch all the girls and mothers of girls in you.
Making a woman
POL
336 pages