Marie Darrieussecq in conversation with Anne de Marcken

Third Place Books welcomes authors Marie Darrieussecq and Anne de Marcken to our Ravenna store for a conversation about Marie's books, Our Life in the Forest and How to Make a Woman, both translated by Penny Hueston and published simultaneously by Transit Books. Author and interdisciplinary artist Anne de Marcken joins in conversation.

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About Our Life in the Forest. . .

In this darkly funny novel crossing the dystopian visions of Helen DeWitt and Kazuo Ishiguro, a woman writes from a forest encampment at the end of the world.

In the near future, our woman in the forest is nearing the end. She's down an eye and a kidney; she's lost the use of one hand; she knows she won't have time to reread what she writes here. Her other half, Marie (a.k.a. Sissy)--around whom our narrator has unwisely constructed her identity, and whom she sacrificed a great deal to set free--is an idiot: deeply incurious, barely ambulatory, and horny. It's hardly Marie's fault (she's a clone). But our half was hoping for more.

In a torrential narrative, with asides for barking laughter, our woman in the forest casts her single roving eye across the opaque mechanisms of their shared past and the strange world that made them (one that is nevertheless familiar in its vices)--driven to understand and communicate, in writing, her conditional personhood. Our Life in the Forest is an unrelenting novel about complicity, love, and the failing body: an irreverent and deeply compelling addition to the female apocalyptic tradition.

About How to Make a Woman. . .

Funny, brutal, and "profoundly original" (Lib ration) — an electrifying double narrative about the creative and destructive potential of friendship between women, from one of the most surprising and prolific voices in French literature.

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 parts, How to Make a Woman 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.

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."

Marie Darrieussecq’s first book, Pig Tales, 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 Is Everything, a literary investigation into the life of the artist Paula Modersohn-Becker, and the novels Men, The Baby, Our Life in the Forest, and, most recently, How to Make a Woman. The New Yorker 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 was awarded the Prix Médicis and the Prix des Prix in 2013.

Penny Hueston’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 Moncrieff 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.

Anne de Marcken is a writer and interdisciplinary artist. She is author of the novel It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over and the lyric novella The Accident: An Account. Her writing has been featured in Best New American Voices, Brick, Ploughshares, Narrative, Elastic, on NPR and elsewhere, garnering numerous awards including The Novel Prize, The Ursula K. Le Guin Fiction Prize, and the Cabell First Novel Prize. She runs the innovative small press The 3rd Thing.

About Third Place Books

Founded in 1998 in Lake Forest Park, Washington, Third Place Books is dedicated to the creation of a community around books and the ideas inside them. With locations in Lake Forest Park and Seattle's Ravenna and Seward Park neighborhoods, Third Place Books is proud to serve the entire Seattle metro area. Learn more about their event series at thirdplacebooks.com/events.