Marie Darrieussecq, Truismes
Our Reading Journey
The narrator writes from hiding, months after the events, addressing an imaginary editor and warning sensitive souls to skip certain pages before she has even said what happened to her. She had been working the counter at a Paris perfumery chain, seeing a man named Honoré, when her body started to change: steady weight gain that everyone around her reads as ripening rather than illness, skin that firms and pinks, and an appetite that will not quit. Darrieussecq builds the transformation from ordinary French idioms taken literally. "Écriture de cochon," pig's scrawl, becomes an actual hand no longer quite human. "Aucune règle," no rules, becomes the missing periods that are the first real sign that something is wrong. The one person who loves her without using her is Yvan, who turns out to be something like a wolf himself, and it is his death, protecting her, that sends the narrator into hiding, in mud and cold, to write the account we are reading.
We set that method against the older tradition of literary metamorphosis. In Ovid, transformation reveals an essence that was already there: Lycaon turns into a wolf because he already had a wolf's cruelty. Kafka breaks that logic with Gregor Samsa, and Darrieussecq breaks it further. Her narrator becomes a sow because the people around her have already been looking at her as one, well before her body catches up. We read this alongside Pierre Bourdieu's être-perçu, his idea that a woman exists first as an object of someone else's gaze, which the novel takes and makes brutally literal. Critics split sharply when the book appeared in 1996: some praised a "colossal finesse," others dismissed it in print as the work of a woman who "writes like a sow." Thirty years later it is a set text in French lycées, and in 2020 Darrieussecq gave the insult back to her critics, writing that with Truismes she had already "denounced my pigs," years before #MeToo and its French echo, #BalanceTonPorc, gave that gesture a name.
About the Author
Marie Darrieussecq was born in 1969 in Bayonne, in the French Basque Country, to a mother who taught French and a father who worked as a technician. She followed the classic elite track: preparatory classes at Lycée Montaigne in Bordeaux, then Louis-le-Grand in Paris, entry to the École normale supérieure in 1990, and the agrégation in modern literature in 1992. Her 1997 doctoral thesis examined autofiction in Perec, Leiris, Doubrovsky, and Guibert, work she left behind for good after finishing it. She trained as a psychoanalyst starting in 2006 and has practiced ever since. Truismes appeared in 1996 from P.O.L., the independent house she chose over Grasset, Seuil, and Fayard, all of which had accepted the manuscript at the same time. She was twenty-seven. The novel sold more than 300,000 copies in France within a year, was translated into roughly forty languages, and was shortlisted for the Prix Goncourt des lycéens. Darrieussecq has since published close to twenty novels, including Naissance des fantômes, Clèves, and Notre vie dans les forêts, and won the Prix Médicis in 2013 for Il faut beaucoup aimer les hommes. She has also translated Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own into French.
