Marie Darrieussecq

Her first book, Truismes (Pig Tales), published at the age of 27, 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.

[1] 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."

I recently wanted to write about the migrants, like everybody else… But in my own way, far from clichés and pre-digested sentences.”[5]Pig 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,[6] overflow and loss, with an unprecedented approach to feminine issues, while resorting to the fantastic, ghosts and monsters.

Darrieussecq has published eighteen novels, a play, a biography, two children's books and several artists’ catalogues.

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.”[8]The 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.

[11]" 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).

[11] 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.

[12]" 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.

[14]" 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.

In Pig Tales, she relates the metaphor of a "monstrous form of puberty"[16] through the metamorphosis of a woman into a sow.

My books are also ecological, for example.”[22]Darrieussecq's writing is characterized by its precision, concision and clarity; nervous, rhythmic, using internal prosody, often in octosyllables or in blank verse.

"[31] In 1998, the writer Marie NDiaye accused Darrieussecq to have "aped"[32] several of her books in order to write My Phantom Husband.

"[33] After these accusations, Darrieussecq published an essay in 2010, Rapport de police, on the question of plagiarism in literature.

In 1988, Marie Darrieussecq was awarded the Prix du jeune écrivain de langue française (the Young French Writer's Prize) for her short story La Randonneuse.

[34] In 1996, the publication of Pig Tales propelled Darrieussecq, at 27 years old, onto the media scene and triggered a shock wave.

White is a hymn to the ocean, to amphibious man, or even the "girl of snow" who appears in Canto VI.

"[37] Upon the publication of Being Here is a Splendour, Life of Paula M. Becker, Etienne de Montety wrote in Le Figaro littéraire in 2016: "(...) nothing of what is feminine is unfamiliar to Marie Darrieussecq.

[41] In 2012, she was "Marraine de l’association d’étudiants du Pays basque aux grandes écoles".