How to Make a Woman

Rose and Solange are lifelong friends, growing up together in 1980s France. Their paths are intertwined, yet they enter adulthood on radically different paths: Rose, who prizes stability above all else, studies psychology and marries her first love, Christian; Solange has numerous affairs, becomes pregnant at fifteen, gives birth to a baby boy, and pursues an acting career. Each tries to find her own happiness, her own sense of meaning, while navigating a world which seeks to establish binary ideas of what a woman can be. How to Make a Woman is a bold, sometimes brutal, coming-of-age novel from the award-winning novelist Marie Darrieussecq.



Marie Darrieussecq was born in Bayonne in 1969 and is recognized as one of the leading voices of contemporary French literature. Her first novel, Pig Tales, was translated into thirty-five languages. In 2013 Marie Darrieussecq was awarded the Prix Médicis and the Prix des Prix for her novel Men. How to Make a Woman was awarded the Grand Prix de l'Héroïne Madame Figaro 2024. She has written art criticism and journalism for a number of publications, including Libération and Charlie Hebdo, and is also a translator from English and has practised as a psychoanalyst. She lives in Paris.