Marie Darrieussecq

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, overflow and loss, with an unprecedented approach to feminine issues, while resorting to the fantastic, ghosts and monsters. Monsters play an important role in Marie 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.

This leads to a dense body of work that unfolds in time and leaves room for experimentation. Marie Darrieussecq has published eighteen novels, a play, a biography, two children’s books and several artists’ catalogues.

“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.”

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. A lot, a lot. Love them a lot to love them. Otherwise it’s impossible, we couldn’t bear them.”

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.” Ghosts wander through all her books, the disappearance of a man, a child or a world. Marie 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.”

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.”

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. Marie Darrieussecq makes Gilles Deleuze’s assertion her own: “Writers are responsible for dying animals.” 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.”

“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.”

Marie Darrieussecq’s writing is characterized by its precision, concision and clarity; nervous, rhythmic, using an 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”, close to “writing as sensation”, an expression she keyed for Nathalie Sarraute.

Marie Darrieussecq, whose mother and two grandmothers spoke Basque, regularly claims in interviews that she doesn’t sacralise French, and considers it as a language among others: “I believe writers have a special relationship with their mother tongue. They dare to touch it, consider it as something outside of themselves, and they can either break or play with this body of language.”Her characters often move from one continent to another and are almost all confronted with foreign languages. In Tom Is Dead, the child’s death was announced in English, since the French narrator was living in Australia:

“After Tom’s death, my English, the way I actually understood English, had shrunk in a way. (…) But during the group therapy, I knew what people were talking about. So I could follow. It was with them that I learned how to speak again. My language lessons.” (Tom Is Dead)

“Marie Darrieussecq’s work reminds one of Lautréamont: the dream of the swine, in Canto IV, begins as follows: “I dreamed that I had entered the body of a swine… when I wanted to kill, I killed.” Pig Tales was born. The passage when Falmer, or the ghost of Maldorer, flies over the Panthéon is My Phantom Husband. White is a hymn to the ocean, to amphibious man, or even the “girl of snow” who appears in Canto VI.”

In 2019, she was appointed President de l’Avance sur recettes (advance on earnings) for the CNC (Centre National du Cinéma et de l’image animée).

In 2016, she published Être ici est une splendeur, Vie de Paula M. Backer (Being Here Is a Splendour, Life of Paula M. Baker), the biography of the German painter Paula Modersohn-Baker, whose surname she amputated in the subtitle “Life of Paula M. Baker”: “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.”

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. It is her trademark.”

In 2014, she participated in Passés par la case prison (Served a prison sentence) and became Patron of the Observatoire des prisons.

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.

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.”

In 2012, she was “Marraine de l’association d’étudiants du Pays basque aux grandes écoles”.

She works on clichés and structures her novels around commonplaces. The journalist Raphaëlle Leyris wrote in 2011:

In 2007, upon the publishing of Tom is Dead, Camille Laurens, who was also published by P.O.L, accused Marie Darrieussecq of “psychic plagiarism”. Their publisher Paul Otchakovsky-Laurens defended Marie Darrieussecq in a tribune in Le Monde entitled “No, Marie Darrieussecq did not pirate Camille Laurens.” After these accusations, Marie Darrieussecq published an essay in 2010, Rapport de police, on the question of plagiarism in literature. A Wikipedia page has been written on the conflict that followed the publication of Tom is Dead.

In 2007, she was elected Patron of Bibliothèques sans frontières.

During the French presidential campaign in 2007, she supported Ségolène Royale.

In 2003, J.M.G. Le Clézio wrote in Le Point:

Marie Darrieussecq has been Patron of the Réseau DES France since 2001, an association that helps victims of Distelbène.

In 1998, the writer Marie NDiaye accused Marie Darrieussecq to have “aped” several of her books in order to write My Phantom Husband.

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."

In 1996, the publication of Pig Tales propelled Marie Darrieussecq, at 27 years old, onto the media scene and triggered a shock wave. That same year, Jean-Luc Godard bought the rights of the novel and then decided not to adapt it.

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.

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.

Marie Darrieussecq, born on the 3rd January 1969 in Bayonne, is a French writer. She is also a translator and has practised as a psychoanalyst.