How to Make a Woman & Our Life in the Forest Marie Darrieussecq Review

How to Make a Woman & Our Life in the Forest Marie Darrieussecq BookBlast Review

Marie Darrieussecq exploded onto the literary scene in 1996 with her debut novel Pig Tales (Truismes). An award-winning literary multi-hyphenate, Darrieussecq’s work spans genres, style and form. Each of her books holds the potential of an entirely new rhythm. Without fail, her prose is packed with wit and gristle.

How to Make a Woman follows the coming of age of two childhood best friends, Rose and Solange, in the Basque country during the 1980s. The novel is written in a close third and split in three sections: first Rose’s story, then Solange’s, then their coming together into a tenuous adulthood and reunion in Los Angeles.

‘According to Rose’

‘According to Rose’ begins with the shock of Solange’s teenage pregnancy, and the girls’ differences are clearly laid out. Rose is certain of her future babies’ names and marriage to her long-time boyfriend, Christian. Whereas the father of Solange’s baby is unknown and out of the picture. Rose does not like ‘fondling’ but ‘cuddles are fine’, while Solange is ‘punk’, an otherworldly apparition, her growing baby a ‘poltergeist’.

Rose sees her girlhood like so: ‘Periods, pregnancy risks, procreation. But what do you do first up, how do you start? Is it painful? She’s already seen an unrolled condom, it looked horribly big’. She even muses, after receiving her first birth control blister pack, that ‘women’s lives are so well organised’.

Rose’s prose is buoyant and poppy, and she slips through her teenage years with a mixture of youthful passivity and striking out against expectation. Darrieussecq’s trademark cheekiness comes through in spades, for example in Rose’s description of naked bodies: ‘enormous breasts and enormous, uhh, dicks’.

Solange is an off-the-page mythic. She is thought of extensively but not seen, spoken to in brief snippets but forgotten about for big events. The pregnancy created a fissure that is not pointed at directly but felt in the lack of scenes of the two girls bonding. When they do properly connect, there’s a sense of how it used to be when they were both girls ageing at the same pace.

‘According to Solange’

For Solange, the village is a hell she must live through before her great escape: ‘In this place, something stagnant catches girls by the ankles and brings them down . . . I’ll be out of here soon.’ Her voice is serious, psychological, angry and stuck. ‘The Holy Mother of God can go and get fucked, for all the help she’s given Solange in her life’. Where Rose had a comfortable upbringing, the men in Solange’s life disappear or die young.

Suicidal ideation and hopelessness are rife for Solange, but Rose is on the page, always in Solange’s mind even if she can’t bring herself to reach out. Rose’s moments of off-hand kindness — for example, a kitten delivered to her doorstep — are bursts of joy in Solange’s narrative after pages of misery. After Rose saves Solange from a suicide attempt, Solange finds purpose in the theatre, and from there ‘a new Solange is in the making’. Being good at something launches her back in to life.

Meaning Shapes Memory

Throughout, there is the ever-present tension-laced question: How are these two girls painting each other in their memories? Moments Rose has narrated in detail — whether that’s a pool scene where Solange abandons her baby to Rose’s care, or Solange borrowing money in a way that deeply annoys Rose — are blips Solange barely gives a sentence to. Rose forgets to invite Solange to a pool party, and this is a driver behind Solange’s suicide attempt.

But when Solange reaches her pinnacle of depression and isolation, both girls remember, in detail, Rose’s otherworldly premonition to pull Solange away from a bus barreling down the road.

Present tense and one scene running into the next makes the whole book feel like a series of highlights shared over coffee. The girls’ eventual reunion, and the book as a whole, is a brilliant testament to how simple kindnesses shape a life.

How to Make a Woman is a masterclass in perspective and class, capturing the messy, visceral reality of lifelong female relationships that are invariably underpinned by a mish-mash of love, rivalry, resentment and mutual need.

Our Life in the Forest could not be more different in genre and structure, much as interconnectedness similarly provides a thematic backbone.

The reader is dropped into the life of narrator, Viviane, who is writing a quick and dirty memoir at the end of her life. She lives on the run with fellow forest dwellers who have all escaped their robot-run dystopian society.

Much of the book is dedicated to what comes before life in the forest. Some of the most poignant scenes are from Viviane’s time as a therapist (likely pulling from Marie’s own training as a psychoanalyst).

Her favourite client is a work-avoidant ‘clicker’ she’s dubbed ‘patient zero’. Clickers draw equivalencies between words to make every possible human connection, all for the end result of uplifting robots’ competency. ‘Blue = sky = melancholy = music = bruising = blue blood = nobility = beheading. Click, click, click, click’.

In the advent of AI and data scraping, the book feels hyper relevant despite its original publication in 2017. This clicker ends up facilitating her passage out of society and into the forest.

The main difference between our world and Viviane’s is the way citizens are seemingly kept alive via cloned doubles known as ‘halves’ — expensive living breathing genetic duplicates. The purpose of Viviane’s comatose half, and halves in general, is ‘a supply of spare parts’. Viviane needs a lung, so her half, who she calls Sissy, gives her a lung. Viviane is taught to think of Sissy as ‘a non-person’, ‘a bundle of organs’, ‘life insurance’. Violence is inherent to good health, class dictates survival. All of this is reminiscent of our own social determinants of health: lower socioeconomic position equals worse health.

The Tricksiness of Recollection

At 116 pages, Our Life in the Forest reads like a sketch thrown to the page. Which makes sense, as our narrator is stuck underground scribbling out as much as she can before a rapidly approaching end. An attention to the text feeling ‘real’ — what with interjections, ramblings, and side trails — loses some narrative cohesion.

Like in How to Make a Woman, Darrieussecq adheres to the realities of scraggly memory and the blurriness of what happened when and how and why. Memory is untidy and lacks chronology, which leaves room for meandering. In Viviane’s story, the narrative rolls without pause, webs stories within stories, jumps around in timeline. There are no chapters, few concrete scenes, yet the narrator (and author) do wink at the reader enough — Viviane admits that she’s known for ‘prattling on’ — to let us know that haziness is the intended effect.

Innocence Sacrificed

This allowed me to read the book as if I was listening to someone describe a psychedelic trip or metaphysical vision. The book has ‘trippy’ touchstones: a childlike version of self is met deep inside a primitive safe place, and a guide pulls one out of constricted reality. Viviane watches her half, Sissy, splash around and wander about in the forest having sex and digging holes. Sissy is carefree, childlike, untouched by hardship, joyfully uninhibited. It makes me think of all sorts of shamanic rituals and meditative traditions, even Jungian archetypes, that invite the traveller to understand or heal the ‘inner child’, though Sissy seems perfectly ‘healed’ to Viviane.

Our Life in the Forest raises uncomfortable questions: what inalienable rights are we willing to take from others? Does a body devoid of experiences (Viviane’s cloned ‘half’) retain its humanity? Life’s big and small horrors, here in the West, pollute us, age us, and, for Vivianne, facilitate taking an organ or two from someone less fortunate. Metaphorically, age requires us to suppress this childlike person inside us. Innocence must be sacrificed, which Rose and Solange can attest to, as well. This is the price of ageing. Both novels explore the moral flexibility of not just a fulfilling life, but ‘life’ full stop.

Both books were released by Transit Books in the United States, and How to Make a Woman is out now in the UK with Fitzcarraldo. Both works are translated from the French to English by Penny Hueston, who has now translated eight of Darrieussecq’s books and won the 2020 Medal for Excellence in Translation. The singular voices and textures in these novels are no doubt a result of Penny’s adept translation.