How to Make a Woman

Marie Darrieussecq | Paperback | June 2026

Winner of the Grand Prix de l’héroïne, 2024, Darrieussecq's new novel explores feminine identity and social pressures upon women through the story of an intense friendship.

Rose tries to appeal to Solange. ‘You and I are alike,’ she says.
‘We might have been alike when we were little, but the truth is that we’re not at all the same.’

An electrifying double narrative about young women’s lives and desires.

Rose, a psychotherapist, and Solange, an actress, are very different, one diligent and loyal, the other rebellious and self-centred, but they have been best friends forever. In How to Make a Woman, we follow the young women’s experiences of adolescence, love, sex, work and motherhood, as they negotiate their place in the world.

This exuberant portrait of female friendship and desires, of two identities under construction, of ‘what gets done to women’, is also a snapshot of French provincial life in the eighties and nineties. Written with humour and heart, How to Make a Woman is another bold, sparkling novel by a leading voice in French contemporary literature.

‘Marie Darrieussecq courses through dark places with such buoyant energy that you emerge exhilarated.’ Helen Garner

'A lucid, clear-eyed and strangely comforting novel about the paths two friends take away from each other.’ Amina Cain, author of Indelicacy

‘Elegant and lucid...a fascinating exploration of a friendship.’ Financial Times

‘Darrieussecq is one of the most prolific and distinguished living writers in France with a truly impressive body of work.’ Samantha Harvey, Guardian

-------

Author Info

Marie Darrieussecq was born in Bayonne in 1969. Her first novel, Pig Tales, was translated into thirty-five languages. She has published more than twenty books and been awarded numerous prizes. Text has published Tom Is Dead, All the Way, Men, Being Here: The Life of Paula Modersohn-Becker, Our Life in the Forest, The Baby, Crossed Lines, Sleepless and How to Make a Woman. Darrieussecq has written art criticism and journalism, is a translator from English and has practised as a psychoanalyst. She lives in Paris.