Marie Darrieussecq (; born 3 January 1969, Bayonne) is a French writer. She is also a translator, and has practised as a psychoanalyst.
Her books explore the unspoken and abandoned territories in literature. Her work is dense, marked by a constant renewal of genres and registers. She is published by the French publisher P.O.L.
Her first book, Truismes (Pig Tales), published at the age of 27, about the metamorphosis of a woman into a sow, was a worldwide success, with a circulation of more than one million copies in France and abroad, translated into forty languages.
In 2013, she was awarded the Prix Médicis and the Prix des Prix for her novel Il faut beaucoup aimer les hommes (Men, A Novel of Cinema & Desire). In 2019, she held the biannual Writer-in-Residence's Chair at Sciences Po in Paris.
Biography
Education In 1986, she passed the Baccalauréat in French Literature in Bayonne. After a two-year preparatory course (Hypokhâgne and Khâgne) in literature at the Lycée Montaigne in Bordeaux and the Lycée Louis-Le-Grand in Paris, she studied at the École Normale Supérieure de la Rue d'Ulm in Paris from 1990 to 1994, followed by the Sorbonne Nouvelle. In 1992, she passed her aggregation in Modern Literature, coming sixth.
Her doctoral thesis under the direction of Francis Marmande, defended in 1997 at the Université Paris VII, was entitled: "Critical Moments in Contemporary Literature. Tragic Irony and Autofiction in the Works of Georges Perec, Michel Leiris, Serge Doubrovsky and Hervé Guibert."
Personal life Her first husband was a mathematician and her second is an astrophysicist. Darrieussecq has three children.
Novels Darrieussecq locates her work in the realm of fiction"I need fiction to see the world better. It’s a bit like when you want to look at the stars: there are some you can’t see when you’re looking right up to the sky, because you have to see it from aside to grasp it better with your eyes. This slanted glance allows us to incorporate the whole world simultaneously. And that’s a good definition of what fiction is for me. Like a step aside that helps us to see things better." Interview with Nathalie Crom, Télérama, August 2007
https://www.telerama.fr/livre/16448-la_peau_sur_les_mots.php and qualifies The Baby as her "only autobiographical book."Marie Darrieussecq, Rapport de police, éditions P.O.L, 2010 (), p.10 Almost all her characters are women, and most of them are narrators. They write, mostly in notebooks, in order to bear witness to events and to survive. Although they seem to resemble the author by their profession (several are psychologists), they are never completely like her. For example, not one of them is an author.
She either writes short monologues or novels in the third person that focus on the world as a whole, through a group of people from a fictive village called Clèves in south-west France, in the Basque country: “I called this fictive, autobiographical village Clèves as a tribute to the Princesse de Clèves. I had had enough of inventing characters. Now I draw them from the reservoir of Clèves, and watch them grow older, from the 80s till much later. Solange, Rose, Christian, etc. (…) There is often an important theme, imposed by what’s happening in the world. I recently wanted to write about the migrants, like everybody else… But in my own way, far from clichés and pre-digested sentences.”Marie Darrieussecq, conférence Zaharoff 2016, Oxford : https://www.mod-langs.ox.ac.uk/events/2016/11/03/zaharoff-lecture-2016-marie-darrieussecqPig Tales and My Phantom Husband can be read as two early novels that announce the total body of her work: she writes about the body and its metamorphosis,« Entretien avec Nelly Kapriélan », on webtv.bpi.fr overflow and loss, with an unprecedented approach to feminine issues, while resorting to the fantastic, ghosts and monsters. Monsters play an important role in Darrieussecq's poetics: she conceives writing as being "available to phantoms," a way of making absence present, making the reader hear the inaudible, and considering, in metaphysical cycles, the encounter between the origin of life and the silence of death."Rencontre avec Marie Darrieussecq, 20th of March 2017"
This leads to a dense body of work that unfolds in time and leaves room for experimentation. Darrieussecq has published eighteen novels, a play, a biography, two children's books and several artists’ catalogues.
She works on clichés and structures her novels around commonplaces. The journalist Raphaëlle Leyris wrote in 2011: “Marie Darrieussecq’s subject has always been same since Pig Tales: examining what language has to say about experience, the way words, namely commonplaces, express reality and, in return, shape reality.”Raphaëlle Leyris, « Une vraie jeune fille », Le Monde, 21 octobre 2011, Read onlineThe title Il faut beaucoup aimer les hommes (Men. A Novel of Cinema and Desire) was taken from a sentence by Marguerite Duras in La Vie matérielle: "We have to love men a lot. A lot, a lot. Love them a lot to love them. Otherwise it’s impossible, we couldn’t bear them.Fabienne Pascaud, « Il faut beaucoup aimer les hommes », Télérama, août 2013"
Themes
As a writer of the metamorphic body, she is interested in mutation, the feminine, the masculine and the non-binary.
The body's relationship to excess and deficiency, outrageousness and disappearance, is a major theme in her work. She says she writes: "for the body and towards the body, within the meaning of what doesn’t speak inside us.« Entretien avec Nelly Kapriélan », on www.mariedarrieussecq.com, June 2010" Ghosts wander through all her books, the disappearance of a man, a child or a world. Darrieussecq explores zones of silence and the unsaid: "Putting words on what has no words, where words do not yet exist, or do not exist anymore.Ibid."
Her characters are generally well-travelled and move between Antarctica (White), Australia (Tom Is Dead), Los Angeles and The Congo (Men) and the Mediterranean on a cruise ship (La Mer à l’envers). She associates psychology and history in her novels with different forms of geography. Nathalie Crom, in an article on her novel Le Pays in La Croix, wrote that she raises "the question of belonging (to a language, a landscape, or a nation), without the slightest nostalgia for a classical or traditional vision of taking root.Nathalie Crom, "Marie Darrieussecq, née quelque part", La Croix, 8 September 2005"
She pays special attention to geography in its relationship with space as well as time, and the Anthropocene Era, conscious that the planet has a limited lifespan. Wild animals and endangered species abound. Darrieussecq makes Gilles Deleuze's assertion her own: "Writers are responsible for dying animals.Video L'Abécédaire de Gilles Deleuze avec Claire Parnet, "La lettre A comme Animal" 1988-1989: https://rutube.ru/video/32c16357d8ac99eee2383959b0a09d0f/" She writes for and in the place of disappearing animals. In an interview with the journalist Mia Funk, she declared: "When the last elephant has disappeared, we will miss him. We miss the Tasmanian tiger.« Interview in english with Mia Funk » [archive], on www.mariedarrieussecq.com, June 2016"
In 2013, she wrote in a chronicle in the newspaper Libération: "We don’t know what will remain of us, once we live on a planet without wild animals. When what is missed is missed to the extent that its name is no longer known, even the hollow form can no longer be felt, and we lose a part of ourselves, we become more stupid, compact and less labile. Less animal, one could say.Marie Darrieussecq, « La disparition des animaux », Libération, 29 November 2013"
A feminine point of view in literature In Pig Tales, she relates the metaphor of a "monstrous form of puberty"Marie Darrieussecq, vidéolecture filmed by Jean-Paul Hirsch about Clèves: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oYtCK0Fi9eU through the metamorphosis of a woman into a sow. Darrieussecq introduces babies into literature with The Baby,Alain Nicolas in L'Humanité, 4 April 2002 a book she qualifies as a "militant literary gesture."Marie Darrieussecq, « J'adorerais être reprise par Beyoncé », in L'Obs, 30 October 2017 In Clèves, she describes the transformation of a teenage girl with the arrival of her first period and her discovery of sexuality. Virginie Despentes wrote in Le Monde des Livres: “Clèves functions like a rewinding up of moments that have not been forgotten or occulted, just never consulted or celebrated.”Virginie Despentes, « Nous avons été cette gamine », Le Monde des Livres, 10/21/2011In 2016, she published Être ici est une splendeur, Vie de Paula M. Becker (Being Here Is Everything: Life of Paula M. Becker), the biography of the German painter Paula Modersohn-Becker, whose surname she amputated in the subtitle "Life of Paula M. Becker": "Women don’t have a name. They have first names. Their name is a transitory loan, an unstable, ephemeral sign. They find other landmarks for their claim to the world, presence, creation and signature. They invent themselves in a man’s world, by infraction."Marie Darrieussecq, Être ici est une splendeur, Vie de Paula M. Becker, éditions P.O.L, 2016, 160 p. (), p.42
After Virginia Woolf, Nathalie Sarraute and Marguerite Duras, Darrieussecq "accounts for the entire world,"France culture, Les Masterclasses, Marie Darrieussecq : "J'accepte que l'écriture soit un état de transe légère", July 2018 considering the fact that half of the world, women, does still not really have the right to speak.
However, she refuses to associate her books with feminist literature: “I have no problem in calling myself a feminist. But I don’t use the word to qualify my books. (…) It would be simplistic. My books are also ecological, for example.”Interview with Elisabeth Philippe, « J'adorerais être reprise par Beyoncé », L'Obs, 30th of October, 2017
Style Darrieussecq's writing is characterized by its precision, concision and clarity; nervous, rhythmic, using internal prosody, often in octosyllables or in blank verse. Her minimalist style, full of anecdotes and scientific or geographical metaphors, serves a "physical form of writing",Robert Solé, « L'écriture physique de Marie Darrieussecq », Le Monde, 20 May 2010 close to "writing as sensation",Marie Darrieussecq, "Hors-champs", France culture [archive], with Laure Adler, February 2012 an expression she keyed for Nathalie Sarraute.
Relationship with language