A flamboyant, feminist, brilliant and uncompromising figure in French literature, Virginie Despentes returns to the spotlight with the release of her new book with an evocative title, Dear asshole. The 53-year-old writer and former member of the Goncourt jury, unveils an epistolary novel on addiction, feminism, the #MeToo movement, social networks, against a backdrop of confinement. Her writing is fundamentally nourished by her experience and she approaches it openly in her work. Thus in his work King Kong Theory published in 2006, she evoked her experience of prostitution, voluntary and occasional.
In an article from World written on the occasion of the publication of his autobiographical essay King Kong Theory, we can read that Virginie Despentes lived off prostitution for two years from 1991 for financial reasons, but it is also a stage of reconstruction after the rape she suffered at the age of 17. “Tell my experience. It’s difficult, she admits, I always stumble on this chapter. (…) I am not saying that in any conditions and for any woman this type of work is trivial.” But like The world makes it clear, she recounts her discovery of“an entirely new world, where money changed value“. And his new vision of men, customers, “attentive, tender. Much more than in real life, in fact”, with “their loneliness, their sadness, their white skin, their unfortunate shyness“.
In Lemagazine.info, the one to whom we owe fuck me or Vernon Subutex comes back to his personal vision of prostitution: “Voluntary and occasional prostitution, which I indulged in for a while, is much more common than you might think. The act itself does not fundamentally upset our reference points related to money or the feminine-masculine relationship. It’s not that different from what happens in some marriages… It can happen in very quiet continuity. On the other hand, talking about it, saying ‘I did it’, immediately propels you into the position of a marginal.“According to the ex of Philippe Manoeuvre, there is not so much difference between the media exposure that she knows and prostitution for that matter:”Everyone ‘pretends’ in the cinema or on TV! Why should there be pure truth in sex rather than elsewhere?“
Dear asshole (2022) and King Kong Theory (2006) by Virginie Despentes are published by Grasset editions