‘I was reborn as a writer’
The French novelist talks about her satire on society and female sexuality
1 Your book Pig Tales is about a woman working at a massage parlour who slowly begins to metamorphose into a pig. How did the idea occur to you?
I was a student, a young girl in Paris and constantly interrupted by men in the street. There was no word or concept at the time (the 1990s) for street harassment, nor for sexual harassment. It was like a “state of nature”. And I could dress like this or like that, it didn’t change anything. I was not harassed because I was wearing a skirt; I was harassed because I was a girl.
I started reflecting that if men saw me like a pig, with pig eyes (there was no name for the male gaze either), I may as well turn into a pig. I was living in a suburb of Paris and one day in the window of a massage parlour disguised as a perfume shop, I saw “my character”, a young woman tightly corseted in a white blouse. It started like that, but most of all it started with a little sing song in my mind, the voice of my character, apparently candid and naïve. Her ignorance makes her the butt of much of the book’s humour. She’s not even aware that she’s a prostitute.
2 Pig Tales is as much a satire on society as it is a book about female sexuality. What was the political scenario like in France when you wrote it? Did any social or political events affect you and make their way into the book?
The political scenario in France in 1996 was the rising of Jean-Marie Le Pen. The president in the book, Edgar, is very recognisable for French people as Le Pen. It was the first book that was so deliberately critical of the extreme right in France. But then, in 2010, when a play was adapted from Pig Tales in a theatre on the Champs-Élysées by Alfredo Arias, the public recognised Edgar as Sarkozy himself.
The excess in speech, the “Ministry of national identity and immigration”, the top model as a wife, the holidays on a yacht as soon as elected, the illegal immigrants flown back on planes, all this was part of Sarkozy politics.
Of course, in the novel I exaggerate things a bit like in a fable, but reality was copying the novel in a way! As a young woman I felt violated by those extremist ideas. I was like a sponge, feeling and perceiving my time through my skin.
3 You keep your protagonist unnamed, but you assign names to her boyfriends — Honoré and Yvan. Why the decision to do so?
Women have no name. They have their father’s name, and if they get married, they switch to their husband’s name. We only have a surname, in this patriarchal system.
My most solid name is Marie; Darrieussecq is the name of my father; and I have a wife name in the administrative French system (which is not so bad sometimes, when I want to separate my day-to-day life as a mother and ordinary citizen from my novels).
I was reborn through writing.