How to Make a Woman

Novel · 256 pages · Paperback · 2026 · Fitzcarraldo Editions

Who pays for leaving

Two girls grow up on opposite sides of a road in Clèves, a village in the French Basque country. Both build a life. Only one starts with the materials.

Marie Darrieussecq's How to Make a Woman, translated by Penny Hueston, tells the next fifteen years twice, first in Rose's account and then in Solange's, before a third part puts the two women under one roof years later. Rose holds the key to her great-grandparents' house, and one day the house will be hers. Solange, across the road, is pregnant at fifteen.

The book prices the difference in one line. "Some people are born with a silver spoon in their mouth, Rose with a big metal key." The joke lands on the noun. A spoon feeds a child once, where a key opens the same door for decades. Rose's parents put money aside to buy her a studio in Bordeaux, and later act as guarantors on her Paris flat. A monthly cheque comes from her father. When she marries Christian, her childhood boyfriend, her parents pay for everything. None of that registers to Rose as expensive. She pays in a different coin. Solange can vanish from her life and re-enter it at will. Rose answers, and goes on looking across the road.

Solange builds mobility out of improvisation. A teacher gets her the single mother's allowance, which she shares with her own mother, who has the baby. Her father lends her a first month's rent in Paris and tells her to figure out the rest for herself. She borrows from Rose, who tires of it. What is left she pays herself, through London squats and waitressing, a lease in a boyfriend's name and no key of her own. Marcos, the bar owner Rose sleeps with, tells Rose that what is pulling her away from Christian is her social milieu and not her studies. Darrieussecq states the class point once.

The double telling is where the novel thinks. From Rose's side, Solange is the girl things happen to, attention, sex, opportunity, a way out into film. Solange's account reprices those years from within, as work and fear. The traffic runs the other way too. Rose's settled life looks finished from across the road. Solange does not see the work of maintaining it. Neither account cancels the other. Each woman misprices the other's life.

Thierry makes the distribution of care impossible to miss. He is Solange's disabled son. The birth takes twenty-four hours and sits only in Solange's half, since the whole class, Rose included, is in Madrid that week. His grandmother raises him first, until her own depression puts her in a clinic. Solange thinks about giving him away. The mother who furnished Rose's studio takes the child next, across the road from the house with the key. By Los Angeles, a makeshift family of grandparents has formed around him, which Solange counts as a present to parents who buried a first Thierry of their own.

Space for Thierry himself is another matter. He barely speaks. In the third section, in a Los Angeles garden, Rose sits him down and circles his big head with her hands, remembering the word Solange used for it, the forceps. For once nobody in the book hedges about him. He answers with a laugh. The words the book hears in it are Rose's. Even that scene happens to him. A novel this careful about whose version of events gets told has no version for Thierry.

What Solange built from nothing can be edited out. The director Kouhouesso's film premieres. Solange's scenes are gone from the cut. The audience applauds over the gap where she should have been. Thierry claps with them, delighted. Mobility got her into the room she wanted. Someone else decides if she is seen.

An earthquake ends the book, with the two women under one garden table and a last line the text assigns to neither of them. Rose still has the house in Clèves, and the key. Solange has the ground she stands on.