1969 Marie Darrieussecq was born on January 3. Her mother taught French literature at junior level and her father was a technician. She grew up in the small village of Bayonne in the French Basque country. She was an avid reader as a child, drawing on her family’s library, which she claims included texts as diverse as the works of Tolstoy and the latest best seller. She referred back to her early formation at the end of her thesis, in terms that suggested that the key themes of her texts were foreshadowed in her childhood imagination, ‘[D]ans mon enfance, il y avait des fantômes autour de moi, les miens, silencieux et présents’.1

Darrieussecq has claimed that she knew from age 6 that she wanted to be a writer. She wrote avidly and also specialized in the study of literature from high school onwards. In 1986 she graduated from secondary school with a Baccalaureate in Literature. In 1988 she achieved some early success, winning the Prix des jeunes écrivains awarded by Le Monde. Around this time, she also became drawn to the work of Hervé Guibert, whose 'fractured biographies' of HIV-infected characters spoke to a generation whose own lives were complicated by the threat of AIDS.2 She was later to complete her Master’s Degree on this author.

1988-1990 Darrieussecq entered Higher Education in Bordeaux, studying the theories of Roland Barthes among other cultural and critical theorists.

From 1990-1994 she studied French Literature in the Ecole Normale Supérieure, Université de Paris. She has described this period as one of dense writing and intense reading. In 1992 she gained her Agrégation de lettres.

For her doctoral thesis, Darrieussecq extended her critical analysis of Giubert’s work with complementary studies of of Perec, Leiris and Doubrovsky. The thesis’s main focus was the interplay of autobiography and irony in these authors’ works.

1994-1996 After leaving the Ecole Normale, Darrieussecq taught French Literature at the University of Lille, specializing in Stendhal and Proust. She has stated that Stendhal’s Chartreuse de Parme comes closest to being her ideal novel, as she prefers ‘les livres auxquels il manque une pièce, qui font entendre un bruit... qui restent ouverts, inachevables, en quelque sorte indéfiniment à écrire’.3

1996 Darrieussecq underwent a course of psychoanalysis. At this point she was writing both academic criticism and fiction. Her main published academic paper ‘L'autofiction, un genre pas sérieux', which dealt with narratology, appeared in the September edition of the journal Poétique. She also wrote Truismes while completing her doctorate. However, Darrieussecq has warned against reading the close publication of both texts as a confirmation that her own writing is predominantly autobiographical. She explains the distinction between life and art stating ‘l'imaginaire est mon domaine, même s'il est forcément nourri (comme chez tous les écrivains) de mon vécu, comme s'en nourrissent les rêves: de loin et métaphoriquement’.4

Truismes – a postmodern tale of shapeshifting that sees a woman slowly transformed into a pig, was a literary sensation when it was published by POL in 1996. The novel, which Darriessecq describes as speaking ‘du corps, vécu de l'intérieur’ introduced some themes that have become central to the author’s work.5 These include a focus on the traumatic transformation of bodies and an exploration of the porosity of physical and psychological boundaries. It also crossed boundaries in terms of audience, becoming both the object of academic critical analysis and a popular cult read. This success reflects Darrieussecq’s stated aim to produce novels that occupy ‘un espace entre Mary Higgins Clark et Claude Simon’.6 In retrospect Darrieussecq has described this period as a turbulent one. In her late twenties, she had sales figures of 300,000 on a first novel that was also translated into 34 languages, whose film rights were sold to Jean-Luc Godard. In her own words she felt ‘a la fois epuissée et sur un nuage’.7

Truismes was not Darrieussecq’s first complete novel, however. She claims to have written 6 previous works, that are not ‘mature’ enough to publish, but which helped her to develop her distinctive style. The as yet unpublished Sorgina (Witch), sent to publishers when Darrieussecq was just 20, had already drawn her work to the attention of noted Minuit editor Jérôme Lindon and elicited feedback that prompted her to keep writing. However, it was Paul Otchakovsky-Laurens rather than Lindon, who was the first to accept Truismes for publication, starting an editorial relationship with POL, which has published all Darrieussecq’s main texts to date.

In 1997 Darrieussecq successfully defended her thesis – Moments critiques dans l'autobiographie contemporaine: l'ironie tragique et l'autofiction chez Doubrovsky, Guibert, Leiris et Perec – before a panel of 4 leading French academics. Following the success of her first novel, however, she gave up lecturing, a profession that she found hard to combine with dedicated novel writing. She also married and divorced her first husband – a mathematician.

1998 Darrieussecq’s second novel, Naissance des fantômes was published. It centres on a woman’s account of the disappearance of her husband, the fading of the artefacts that remind her of him and the effects of these processes on her own sense of identity. Darrieussecq has claimed that this core disappearance, although phantasmagorical in some of its aspects, needs to be seen as real, ‘Son mari disparaît pour de bon. C'est le réel qui s'est fissuré, c'est le réel qui est fou’.8 The phantom husband disappears at the microcosmic level, molecule by molecule. As Darrieussecq sees it, ‘[c]e n'est pas le personnage du mari qui a disparu, ce sont ses atomes’.9 The fissuring and fracturing of what is apparently real is a theme that Darrieussecq identifies in scientific research as well as fiction. Although the novel was also informed by remembered childhood fears of darkness, the author has stated repeatedly that reflecting on scientific phenomena provides some of the inspiration for her writing. She claims, for example ‘[L]a science enrichit mon imaginaire, m'apporte des images, des métaphores et des fictions pour rendre compte du monde’.10 These inspirations notwithstanding, particular readers often make very concrete social reinterpretations of this text. When on a reading tour of Argentina, for instance, audience members told Darrieussecq that the novel spoke to them of the tragedy of the ‘Disappeared’.11

Sadly, the publication of this text brought Marie Ndiaye into public conflict with Darrieussecq as the former accused the latter in the press of reproducing themes and motifs first explored in Ndiaye’s texts Un temps de saison (1994) and La Sorcière(1996). Darrieussecq denies this accusation claiming the texts of authors such as Georges Perec and Henry James as truer antecedents of her own. Critical opinion has tended to support Darrieussecq’s case, suggesting that no author has a monopoly on particular themes.

1999 Le Mal de mer and Précisions sur les vagues were published. A version of the former had been submitted previously to Gallimard, but not published. The narrative of a mother and child voyaging round an out-of-season seaside town, in flight from a mysterious father figure, revisits motifs of loss, and disconnected relationships. Unsteady personal boundaries are reflected in the fearful boundlessness of the ocean, which appears to the daughter as ‘une bouche plus grande que toutes les bouches imaginables, et qui fend l’espace en deux’.12

2000 Bref séjour chez les vivants was published. It is a multiple narrative constructed from the experiences of a fractured French family and their main observer, a lost family member. Again it explores states of disconnection. Critic Eva Domeneghini has described the novel as ‘une [...]variation sur la disparition et l'impossibilité d'y faire face, sur le silence, les secrets de famille et la fuite du temps qui encombre plus qu'il ne permet de remplir l'existence’.13
In the same year, Darrieussecq married an Astrophysics researcher, whose specialism is the study of meteors.

2001 Darrieussecq’s son was born, and she published Le Bébe. Although the author has implied that this is the most autobiographical of her books, neither the mother, nor the baby is given a first name. The latter is simply ‘le bébe’ throughout. What the novel explores in minute detail, however, is the constraining and amazing symbiosis between the unnamed mother and child. The novel was also written in part to address the lack of babies as literary subjects.

2003 White was published. Set in the penetratingly icy world of the Antarctic, it describes how members of a research project wrestle with the continuing traces of social situations they have tried to leave behind, as well as the phantoms of explorers who preceded them historically. It extends Darrieussecq’s project of exploring shifting identities by describing the precise phenomenon that accompany and magnify significant personal transformations

1From Marie Darrieussecq, Moments critiques dans l'autobiographie contemporaine: l'ironie tragique et l'autofiction chez Doubrovsky, Guibert, Leiris et Perec (thesis, 1997).
2 Darriessecq quoted in ‘Avec les fèlicitations de la jury’, Le Nouvel Observateur, 1737 (February 2 1998).
3 Interview with Becky Miller and Martha Holmes. Available online at <http://www.uri.edu/artsci/ml/durand/darrieussecq/fr/ent_exclusif.html>.
4 Darrieussecq quoted in Holmes, Martha, Biographie.Available online at <http://www.uri.edu/artsci/ml/durand/darrieussecq/fr/biographie.html>.
5Garcin, Jérôme, ‘Marie Darrieussecq: l’apres-Truismes’, Le Nouvel Observateur, 1684 (19-25 February 1998), pp. 88-90.
6 Ibid.
7Garcin, Jérôme, ‘Marie Darrieussecq: l’apres-Truismes’, Le Nouvel Observateur, 1684 (19-25 February 1998), pp. 88-90.
8 Ibid.
9 Garcin, Jérôme, ‘Marie Darrieussecq: l’apres-Truismes’, Le Nouvel Observateur, 1684 (19-25 February 1998), pp. 88-90.
10 Darrieussecq quoted in Holmes, Martha, Biographie.Available online at <http://www.uri.edu/artsci/ml/durand/darrieussecq/fr/biographie.html>.
11 As shared by the author at a talk at the Institute of Romance Studies, (June20 2003).
12 Darrieussecq, Marie, Le Mal de mer, (Paris: POL 1999), p. 9.
13 Domeneghini, Eva, Review of Bref Sejour chez les vivants (2001). Available online at <http://ecrits-vains.com/critique/domeneghini20.htm>.

'La notion du leurre chez Hervé Guibert: décryptage d'un roman-leurre, L'incognito',Nottingham French StudiesStudies, (34), 1, (spring 1995), 82-8.

'L'autofiction, un genre pas sérieux', Poetique, 107 (September 1996), 369-80.

Truismes (Paris: POL,1996).

'Quand je me sens très fatiguée le soir', L'Infini, 58 (summer 1997), 26-8.

Naissance des fantômes (Paris: POL, 1999).

'Marie Redonnet et l'écriture de la mémoire', in Dominique Viart (ed.) Ecritures contemporains 1: mémoires du récit (Paris and Caen: Lettres Modernes Minard, 1988), pp.174-94.

'Isabel', L'Infini, 62 (summer 1998), 16-19.

Le Mal de mer (Paris: POL, 1999).

Précisions sur les vagues (Paris: POL, 1999).

Claire dans le forêt, previously unpublished short story sold with Elle, 2848 (31 July 2000).

'Lamarche-Vidal immanquablement', L'Infini, 70 (summer 2000), 57-64.

Bref séjour chez les vivants (Paris: POL, 2001).

Le Bébe (Paris: POL, 2002).

White (Paris: POL, 2003).

Le Pays (Paris: POL, 2005).

Zoo (Paris: P.O.L., 2006).

Tom est mort (Paris: P.O.L., 2007)

Pig Tales (Truismes), trans. Linda Coverdale (London: Faber & Faber, 1997).

My Phantom Husband (Naissance des fantômes), trans. Helen Stevenson (London: Faber & Faber, 1999).

Breathing Underwater (Le Mal de mer). trans. Linda Coverdale (London: Faber & Faber, 2001).

Undercurrents: A Novel (Le Mal de mer), trans. Linda Coverdale (New York:
The New Press, 2001).

Baudet, M., 'Marie Darrieussecq, auteur à haute résolution', Libre Culture (19 May 1999), p. 21.

Bourcier, Jean-Pierre, 'Marie Darrieussecq: "européenne, féministe et athée"', La Tribune (13 November 1996), p. 20.

Garcin, Jérôme, 'Marie Darrieussecq: l'après-Truismes', Le Nouvel Observateur, 1684 (19-25 February 1998), pp. 88-90).

Gaudemar, Antoine de, 'Darrieussecq, du cochon au volatil', Libération (Livres) (26 February 1998), pp. 1-111.

Henley, J., 'Parables of Panic', Guardian (G2) (16 June 1999), p. 16.

Lambeth, John 'Entretien avec Marie Darrieussecq', The French Review 79.4 (March 2006), pp.806-818 [MD talks about her texts from Truismes to White].

Le Fol, Sébastien, 'Marie Darrieussecq: "Je veux changer la langue!"', Le Figaro
(11 March 1999), p. 79.

Vantoys, Carole and Catherine Argand, 'Ils publient leur premier roman', Lire
(September 1996), pp. 34-35.

Weitzmann, M., 'Sup normal', Les Inrockuptibles (18 February 1998), pp. 16-18.

Wrobel, Catherine, 'Cochonne rose et humour noir', France Soir (4 September 1996),p.11.

Baron, Anne-Marie, 'Truismes de Marie Darrieussecq: une expérience pédagogique en
classe de seconde', L'Ecole des Lettres 11, 8 (1997-8), 3-9.

Favre, Isabelle, 'Marie Darrieussecq ou lard de la calorie vide', Women in French
Studies, 8 (2000), 164-176.

Gaudet, Jeanette, 'Une Conversation avec Marie Darrieussecq : Des livres sur la liberté', Dalhousie French Studies 59 (Summer 2002), 108-18.

—'Dishing the Dirt: Metamorphosis in Marie Darrieussecq's Truismes', Women in French Studies 9 (2001), 181-192.

Jordan, Shirley, 'Saying the unsayable: identities in crisis in the early novels of Marie Darrieussecq' in Gill Rye and Michael Worton (eds.), Women's Writing in Contemporary France: New Writers, New Literatures in the 1990s (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2002), pp 142-153.

— '“Un grand coup de pied dans le chateau de cubes”: formal experimentation in Marie Darrieussecq's Bref sejour chez les vivants', The Modern Language Review 100.1 (January 2005), 51-67.

— Contemporry French Women's Writing: Women's Visions, Women's Voices, Women's Lives (Oxford and Bern: Peter Lang, 2004).

— 'Figuring out the family: family as everyday practice in contemporary French women's writing', in Affaires de famille: The Family in Contemporary French Culture and Theory, ed. Marie-Claire Barnet and Edward Welch (Amsterdam/New York: Rodopi, 2007), pp.39-58.

McAllister, N., 'Woolf at the shore', Observer Review (13 May 2001), p.15.

Michel, Christian, '"Le réel dort aussi": un panorama de jeune roman français', Esprit, 225 (October 1996), 43-67.

Nettlebeck, Colin W., 'Novelists and their engagement with history: some contemporary French cases', Australian Journal of French Studies, 35(2) (May-August 1998), 243-57.

Phillips. John, 'Truismes by Marie Darrieussecq', in John Phillips, Forbidden Fictions, Pornography and Censorship in Twentieth Century Literature (London: Pluto Press, 1999), pp. 182-92.

Roche, Daria Michelle, From Object to Subject: Language and the Body in Novels by Marie Cardinal, Christiane Rochefort, Marie-Claire Blais, and Marie Darrieussecq, (thesis, held by University of Indiana, 2000).

Rodgers, Catherine, 'Aucune évidence: les truismes de Marie Darrieussecq',Romance Studies, 18(1) (June 2000), 69-81.

— 'Entrevoir l’absence des bords du monde dans les romans de Marie Darrieussecq', in Nathalie Morello and Catherine Rodgers (eds.), Nouvelles écrivaines: Nouvelles voix? ( Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2002), pp.83-103.

Rye, Gill 'Women's writing', in Abigail Gregory and Ursula Tidd (eds),Women in Contemporary France (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2000), pp.133-151.

— 'In uncertain terms: mothering without guilt in Marie Darrieussecq's Le Mal de mer and Christine Angot's Leonore, toujours', L'Esprit Createur ('A new generation: sex, gender and creativity in contemporary women's writing in French', special issue, ed. Gill Rye) 45.1 (Spring 2005).

Sadoux, Marion, 'Le corps au fantastique: métamorphoses de Marie Darrieussecq',La Choutte, 29 (1998), 15-25.

— 'Marie Darrieussecq's Truismes: hesitating between fantasy and truth',Journal of the Institute of Romance Studies, 7 (1999), 197-203.

Sarrey-Strack, Colette, Fictions contemporaines au féminin : Marie Darrieussecq, Marie Ndiaye, Marie Nimier, Marie Redonnet ( Paris : L'Harmattan, 2002).

Samoyault, Tiphaine, 'Mer cannibale', Les Inrockuptibles (17 March 1999), pp.58-9.

Forthcoming

Robson, Kathryn, 'Virtual reality : the subject of loss in Marie Darrieussecq's Naissance de fantômes and Regine Detambel's La Chambre d'echo', Australian Journal of French Studies.

Marie Darrieussecq<http://www.uri.edu/artsci/ml/durand/darrieussecq/en/index.html>The main website dedicated to the work of Marie Darrieussecq is hosted by the University of Rhode Island, and it addresses a previous gap in provision. It is an extensive site, with a critical bibliography, interview and information about the author. Links to other related sites can be accessed via <http://www.uri.edu/artsci/ml/durand/darrieussecq/en/useful_links.html>.Please note that this website has been updated recently with additional interesting material added.

POL<http://www.pol-editeur.fr/>Publisher's site.

ZazieWeb<http://www.zazieweb.fr/site/fichelivre.php?num=6175> This link from literary site Zazieweb provides an insightful review of Darrieussecq's last novel, White (2003).

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