{"id":75134,"date":"2026-08-31T18:55:36","date_gmt":"2026-08-31T22:55:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/?p=75134"},"modified":"2026-08-31T18:55:36","modified_gmt":"2026-08-31T22:55:36","slug":"sub-rosa-september-selection-how-to-make-a-women","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/2026\/08\/31\/sub-rosa-september-selection-how-to-make-a-women\/","title":{"rendered":"Sub Rosa September Selection: How to Make a Women"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"The Sub Rosa reading group will meet Saturday September 26th at 6:30pm<\/strong> to discsuss How to Make a Women<\/a> by Marie Darrieussecq<\/p>\n

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It is–to start–the 1980s, in a small village in the French Basque Country. Rose and Solange are fifteen and have been friends forever; only now Solange is pregnant.<\/p>\n

A novel in two irreducible parts, How to Make a Woman<\/i> narrates, in Marie Darrieussecq’s relentless prose, the coming-of-age of these two young women against the backdrop of the final decades of the twentieth century: scenes and subcultures, the AIDS epidemic, the end of history. Rose goes to nearby Bordeaux to study psychology, maintaining an equivocal relationship with her childhood sweetheart; Solange shakes off old attachments to pursue a life on the stage and in pulsing city centers.<\/p>\n

In Bordeaux, Paris, London, and Hollywood, as they pass in and out of each other’s lives, each makes use of, and makes, the other in this bold novel–mischievous, exuberant, and radical–about sexuality, self-knowledge, and “what is done to women in the world.”<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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“In elegant and lucid prose, artfully translated by Penny Hueston, Darrieussecq traces the path of necessary foibles, wrong turns and occasional triumphs that make up a life… How to Make a Woman <\/em>is a fascinating exploration of a friendship that is constantly in limbo.”–Oonagh Devitt Tremblay, Financial Times<\/em><\/strong><\/div>\n
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“Earthy and absorbing, with a sense of infectious intimacy… Susan Sontag once wrote: ‘To be a woman is to be an actress. Being feminine is a kind of theatre.’ In How to Make a Woman<\/i> Marie Darrieussecq explores this proposition, pulling back the curtain on the charades of femininity with clarity and empathy.'”—Times Literary Supplement<\/i><\/b><\/div>\n
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“Sharp-sighted prose, seamlessly translated… How to Make a Woman<\/em> is a glorious exploration of the transient identities of youth and the complicated nature of friendship; the condition of loving and loathing a person both at once.”–Sara Baume, The Irish Times<\/em><\/strong><\/div>\n
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\"\"Marie Darrieussecq<\/b>‘s first book, Pig Tales<\/i>, became an overnight sensation and bestseller, selling more than 300,000 copies and translated into more than thirty languages–since then, she has gone on to publish twenty more, including Being Here, a literary investigation into the life of the artist Paula Modersohn-Becker, and the novels Men<\/i>, The Baby<\/i>, and Our Life in the Forest<\/i>. The New Yorker<\/i> described her as France’s “best young novelist,” and she is recognized as one of the leading voices of French contemporary literature. Her novel Men<\/i> was awarded the Prix M\u00e9dicis and the Prix des Prix in 2013. <\/p>\n

Penny Hueston’<\/b>s translations from French include novels by Emmanuelle Salasc and Patrick Modiano and eight books by Marie Darrieussecq. She has been shortlisted for the JQ-Wingate Prize, the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation, twice for the Scott Moncrief Prize, and twice for the New South Wales Premier’s Translation Prize, and she was the winner of the 2020 Medal for Excellence in Translation.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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The Sub Rosa reading group will meet Saturday September 26th at 6:30pm to discsuss How to Make a Women by Marie Darrieussecq It is–to start–the 1980s, in a small village in the French Basque Country. Rose and Solange are fifteen and have been friends forever; only now Solange is pregnant. A novel in two irreducible […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-75134","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75134","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=75134"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75134\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=75134"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=75134"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=75134"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}