We find in Making a womanthe twentieth book by Marie Darrieussecq, Rose and Solange, childhood friends, neighbors and classmates from a small town in the Basque Country in the mid-1980s.
Characters who will perhaps be familiar to readers of the French novelist, since Rose was the heroine of The sea upside down (2019), and that we also got to know Solange in Cleves (2011, freely adapted into a TV film by Rodolphe Tissot in 2022) as well as in You have to love men a lot (2013, Medici Prize).
We know the famous formula of Simone de Beauvoir taken from Second sex (1949): “We are not born a woman, we become one. » The new novel by the writer, born in 1969 in Bayonne, is in a certain way the practical application of this.
“It was both to pay homage to him and to detach myself a little from him, even if I owe him a lot, like all women, and all men for that matter,” recognizes Marie Darrieussecq, reached at her home in Paris. I wanted something less philosophical, much more concrete, where we could hear the DIY side of this creation of a woman. »
Pregnant at the age of 15, Solange, “extremely late for an abortion”, will have to carry her pregnancy to term despite herself. The teenager, from a dysfunctional family – absent father, depressed mother – had had sexual relations with an adult neighbor, an “old boy” fan of AC/DC who served as her “babysitter”. Cleves told the feminine, and as close as possible – without the consequences – the discovery of the body, of desire, of men, of freedom.
Making a womana novel also very embodied, is in a way the sequel, tracing over several years, since they were 15, the parallel trajectories, the bifurcations and the rapprochements of these two childhood friends who come from socio-economic backgrounds. different.
The heroines of this coming-of-age novel will, in a way, “make” themselves, without instructions. Build themselves and transform themselves with the materials that are theirs and those that they will find along the way: happy or unhappy experiences, diktats, injunctions, male domination.
Themes that have always driven Marie Darrieussecq. In 1996, his first book, Truisms, recounted, we remember, the metamorphosis of a woman into a sow. While in 2002, The babybetween diary, novel and philosophical reflection, addressed the question of motherhood.
“In the 1980s and 1990s, where I come directly from, we made ourselves as best we could, with much fewer liberating feminist concepts than today. And there was a Frankenstein aspect, that is to say we had to make do with pieces of women that we stuck on each other. And this, through male domination which, in the Basque Country in the 1980s, was completely uninhibited. »
To be and not to be (a liberated woman)
It was also very difficult for the boys who did not want to comply with these virile injunctions, remembers the novelist, who wanted to include two counter-models in the novel, Brice and Christian. “To be a guy in the Basque Country in the 1980s, you had to be a rugby player, drink a lot, pick up girls very heavily, or worse. »
“But for the girls, there were two contradictory injunctions which made our lives very complicated. You had to be a liberated woman, in quotes, and above all not be a slut. We had to sleep and not sleep,” summarizes Marie Darrieussecq with a burst of laughter. An impossible art.
After a difficult birth, Solange will entrust the child to her mother, resume her studies, discover the theater and somehow escape without looking back. Direction Bayonne and Bordeaux, first, then Paris, London and on to Los Angeles, where the young actress will carve out a small celebrity in the world of cinema.
For her part, her friend Rose will have a more “classic” itinerary: psychology studies, marriage with her first lover, children, family life, career.
Marie Darrieussecq thinks she has put, in equal measure, a little of herself into these two female characters. “I have a very good student side, I tried to do everything well. But there was always a little “bug” in me that caused things to go off the rails. I also had a very punk side, I hated the order as it was imposed on me. I went to nightclubs a lot when I started my studies in Bordeaux,” she remembers with a little nostalgia.
While many things have changed today in relationships between men and women, this era may seem distant. “When I talk to my daughters or my son, with modesty, about certain events from my youth, they say to me: but you didn’t file a complaint? It was unimaginable to file a complaint. We would never have found the police listening to this type of complaint, to what we called the gray zone and which today is described as a sexual assault zone. And that’s good for girls and boys. We need to invent other relationships,” believes Marie Darrieussecq.
Heterosexuality, this painful problem
“I often use, somewhat provocatively, this phrase from Michel Foucault: heterosexuality, this painful problem. Because heterosexuality, continues the writer and psychoanalyst, is very complicated. It is presented to us as a state of nature, whereas a man and a woman trying to make love together is a whole story… Each gender is caught up in speeches, clichés, injunctions, orders . It is very difficult to touch, in fact, to meet. There are a lot of misunderstandings. And in the 1980s, these were misunderstandings that were also caught up in a rape culture. I am very happy to live after #MeToo, after these questions have been brought to light. »
We thus find in Making a woman certain episodes which could relate to sexual assault – not even to mention the “frotteurs” in the metro -, but where the writer, as an observer, refuses to make any moral comments a posteriori.
“In my life as a woman and citizen, I am a committed feminist, but in my novels, I absolutely want to leave room for readers. So that they can form their own opinion and feel what they have to feel in their heads. I hate novels that explain. I really want us to be with the characters and live in their skin, in their lives. »
For a dozen years, Marie Darrieussecq has forced herself to draw from a gallery of characters that she has already created. Solange and Rose appear in four of his novels so far, and it’s a safe bet that we’ll see them again. “When you choose constraints to write, they transform into freedom. Georges Perec taught us this well. I decided, after Cleves, around 2011, to keep these characters, who were good little soldiers of the novel. Effective characters, which I just had to refine and experiment with in other stories. »