Marie Darrieussecq in conversation with Rita Bullwinkel

About this event

City Lights and Transit Books present Marie Darrieussecq in conversation with Rita Bullwinkel Transit Books celebrates the publication of How to Make a Woman Translated by Penny Hueston Published by Transit Books and Our Life in the Forest Translated by Penny Hueston Published by Transit Books Marie Darrieussecq’s first book, Pig Tales, became an overnight sensation and bestseller, selling more than 300,000 copies and translated into more than thirty languages—since then, she has gone on to publish twenty more, including Being Here Is Everything, a literary investigation into the life of the artist Paula Modersohn-Becker, and the novels Men, The Baby, Our Life in the Forest, and, most recently, How to Make a Woman. The New Yorker described her as France’s “best young novelist,” and she is recognized as one of the leading voices of French contemporary literature. Her novel Men was awarded the Prix Médicis and the Prix des Prix in 2013. About How to Make a Woman 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.” About Our Life in the Forest 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. Rita Bullwinkel is the author of Headshot (2024) and Belly Up, which garnered a 2022 Whiting Award. Bullwinkel’s writing has been published in Tin House, the White Review, ZYZZYVA, Conjunctions, BOMB, Vice, NOON, and Guernica. She is a recipient of grants and fellowships from MacDowell, Brown University, Vanderbilt University, Hawthornden Castle and the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation. Her work has been translated into Italian, Greek, and Dutch. Both her fiction and translation have been nominated for Pushcart Prizes. She is an Editor at Large for McSweeney’s, the Deputy Editor of The Believer, a Contributing Editor for NOON, and the creator of Oral Florist. She is an Assistant Professor of English at University of San Francisco where she teaches courses on creative writing, zines, and the uses of invented and foreign languages as tools for world building. This event made possible by the City Lights Foundation

Who

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  Marie DarrieussecqAuthorMarie Darrieussecq is a French writer. She is also a translator, and has practised as a psychoanalyst.Photo: Ji-Elle, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Marie_Darrieussecq-Strasbourg_2011_%284%29.jpg)
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Books

• How to Make a WomanMarie DarrieussecqBuy on Bookshop.org
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  Our Life In The ForestMarie DarrieussecqBuy on Bookshop.org

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More by Marie Darrieussecq

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  SleeplessMarie DarrieussecqBuy on Bookshop.org

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Venue

CCSF North Beach / Chinatown Bookstore

CA

Venue website

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