34 The New York Review
protests and concerts she’d organized,
the authenticity and excitement that
could never match the bourgeois ste-
rility she was now thrust into. When a
journalist asked her if turning her first
trick had felt like violating the ultimate
taboo, she responded, “Much less so
than my first television appearance.”
For her next books, Despentes
was approached by the more estab-
lished Éditions Grasset. She injected
the genre of pulp fiction with gritty
feminism, creating a world of chain-
smoking lesbian private eyes and slick
despicable male producers, where peo-
ple died violently, often at the hands of
women. Despentes’s protagonists were
female misfits, constitutionally unable
to perform femininity. She married
camp and noir with a sharp- as- nails
satire of gender politics. She had an
uncanny ear for how people spoke, and
those voices, rich with broken rules,
transcended the dialogue and filled the
narration. “I’m not interested in the
beautiful sentence,” Despentes told a
reporter. “That’s fine for other people,
but I don’t give a fuck about it.” She
claimed to have written her early books
in coke- fueled binges, up against dead-
lines, and they read that way.
Underlying all of Despentes’s work is
the concept of rape. It is the omnipres-
ent possibility through which every-
thing is refracted. There’s a war going
on, her books insist, not so much be-
tween men and women as on men and
women, waged through the constructs
of gender. Masculinity, for Despentes,
is the artillery that tears our bodies
apart, while femininity is the drug of
mass indoctrination. What she had
learned from punk rock, she once said,
was to look clearly at the world and de-
clare it rotten.
In the 1990s French literature was
breaking open, and the literary scene
was making room for postcolonial
writers, provocateurs (notably Michel
Houellebecq), and women (notably
women who, writing frankly about sex
and desire, were also deemed provoca-
teurs). Twenty- seven- year- old Marie
Darrieussecq’s Pig Tales: A Novel of
Lust and Transformation (1996), a
fable narrated by a woman who slowly
transforms into a pig, was, in the au-
thor’s words, about “the metamorpho-
sis of a female object into a conscious
woman.” Twenty- six- year- old Lorette
Nobécourt’s La démangeaison (1994,
never translated into English), a short,
deranged tale narrated by a woman
whose chronic itch consumes her en-
tire body and then her thoughts, was
impossible to read without scratching
your own skin. Christine Angot’s L’In-
ceste (1999) scandalized the French
public with its autofictional account of
her sexual relationship with her father.
Catherine Millet’s The Sexual Life of
Catherine M. (2001) detailed her nu-
merous exploits; Edmund White called
it “the most explicit book about sex ever
written by a woman.” But Despentes’s
work had one thing these other books
did not: an uninhibited rage, directed
not solely at men, but at every part of
the systems that gave them power—in-
cluding any woman who played along
by wrapping herself in the straitjacket
of femininity.
In 2000 Despentes codirected the film
adaptation of Baise- Moi, along with
Coralie Trinh Thi, an adult film star
known as “the intellectual of the X-
rated.” It was shot in six weeks on a very
low budget and starred two other porn
actors, Karen Lancaume and Raffaëla
Anderson. France doesn’t share Ameri-
ca’s genre distinction between hardcore
and softcore pornography, but rather
distinguishes between simulated and
unsimulated sex, and the film left lit-
tle doubt that the sex was unsimulated.
The three- minute- long rape scene,
filmed in an abandoned warehouse,
is excruciating. Karla’s screams echo
off the walls as the camera cuts be-
tween the act of penetration and the
blood that streams into her mouth.
Manu breathes heavily through her
nose, unmoving, while a man spits into
his hand to lubricate himself. “I feel
like I’m fucking a zombie,” he says, hit-ting her. “Move your ass a bit.” After
the men depart, the camera lingers on
Manu on her hands and knees, small
in the vast empty space. She trembles
with a fury that could tear the world
apart.
The film opened in sixty theaters in
France that June, and managed to unite
fascists and the far left, Christians and
feminists in protest. The feminists held
that the film was dangerous for suggest-
ing violence as an answer to rape. (W hy
shouldn’t it be? Despentes wanted to
know.) Two days after it opened, the
French Council of State revoked
the film’s rating, effectively banning
the movie by relegating it to the hand-
ful of pornographic theaters still in op-
eration in France. After further uproar,
the minister of culture created a new
rating that allowed the film to be dis-
tributed but not shown to minors. By
the time the film reopened in France
a year later, the hypocrisy of the scan-
dal—a film too sexual for the libertine
French?—had led to its being exported
worldwide. It went on to gross nearly
$1 million in France and abroad.
And yet, despite this international
success, Despentes still remains rela-
tively unknown in the United States.
A translation of Baise- Moi by Bruce
Benderson was published by Grove
in 2002; over ten years later, Feminist
Press put out several of her pulp nov-
els—Apocalypse Baby (translated by
Siân Reynolds, 2015), Bye Bye Blondie
(translated by Reynolds, 2016), and
Pretty Things (translated by Emma
Ramadan, 2018)—each with covers by
the writer and artist Molly Crabapple,
a fitting American punk counterpart
to Despentes. Parul Sehgal expertlycondensed these books’ ethos in her
New York Times review in 2016, but
Despentes’s popularity in the US has
never transcended cult circles.
After the film’s release, Despentes
quit alcohol and drugs, curious to see
what kind of writer she would become
if she allowed herself to survive into old
age. At thirty- five, she, in her phrasing,
“became a lesbian.” Her long, intense
relationship with the Spanish writer-
philosopher Paul B. Preciado (then
known as Beatriz) captivated their
readers. Preciado detailed both the
beginning of his transition and the be-
ginning of their affair in the book Te s t o
Junkie (2013), in which he described
Despentes as “the aristocratic brain of
a futurist she- wolf lodged in the body
of a hooker, the intelligence of a Nobel
Prize winner incarnated in a streetdog.” In a series of newspaper essays
recently published as An Apartment
on Uranus (MIT Press), he defines for
himself what might be called a nonbi-
nary gender—though Preciado, resis-
tant to labels, defines it in a hundred
other ways—and details the dissolution
of their relationship (yet Despentes’s
tender foreword to that book proves
the two have remained close).
Preciado writes with sublimely unfet-
tered arrogance, embracing the impen-
etrable density of queer theory (with
sentences full of his own portmanteaus
like “necropolitical” and “techno-
patriarchal”). Stylistically, his and
Despentes’s work could not be more op-
posed, but the idea of living constantly
in transition, of in-between-ness as
the destination, is intellectually invig-
orating to Despentes. Still, she cannot
help but observe Preciado’s changing
body through the stark binaries that
so dominate her own work. “When
we’re together on the street what both-
ers me most is not that men speak to
you better, it’s that women don’t be-
have in the same way anymore,” she
writes. “[Straight] women think you’re
their type and they let you know as all
women do, by showering you with lit-
tle gratuitous attentions.” Even as she
admires Preciado for rejecting gen-
der, she sees the world around him as
cleaved into two stereotypes—back-
slapping men and simpering women.
Despentes is at times asked by the
French press if becoming a lesbian
somehow helped make her a better
writer (she is rarely asked if becoming
sober did). She responds, emphatically,
yes: in her heterosexual life, her suc-
cess hindered her capacity for seduc-tion. Men were threatened by her. As
a lesbian, she says, the more successful
she became, the more attractive she
became. The same with aging—being
a lesbian was a liberation. All women,
she says, would be lesbians, if only the
stigma were removed.Despentes’s most recent work, The
Ver non S ubu tex trilogy, which began
appearing in 2015, catapulted her into
the high echelons of the literary estab-
lishment. (Subutex is the brand name
of a drug prescribed to treat opioid ad-
diction, and one just as easily abused;
“Vernon” might be a reference to the
pen name that Boris Vian took for
his Vernon Sullivan novels, though
Despentes says “Vernon Subutex” was
just an “idiot punk pseudonym” she
once used for a fake Facebook profile.)
The first volume sold over 700,000 cop-
ies, and in 2016 she was named one of
the ten members of the Académie Gon-
court (although earlier this year she
stepped down from the prestigious jury
in order to have more time to write).
The series is a departure from her
pulp writing, a sprawling Parisian epic
à la Zola, focused as much on class as
on sex. Vernon is an aging Gen X- er
whose small Parisian record store,
once the center of an entire social cir-
cle, is shuttered by the changing music
industry. He isolates himself, can’t find
work, and eventually stops receiving
his unemployment checks. For a time,
his rent is paid by Alex Bleach, a young
musician whose skyrocketing fame left
others jealous; when Bleach dies of an
overdose, Vernon is evicted. The book
follows his peripatetic journey across
the couches of old friends, from bitterly
unmarried women to bitterly married
men, with each narrating a chapter (a
format that more closely resembles the
TV show High Maintenance than it
does a novel).
Vernon eventually finds himself liv-
ing on the street, where he is adopted
by homeless people with more kind-
ness than anyone else has shown him.
Vernon delivers the first volume’s clos-
ing monologue as he emerges from a
disorienting fugue state to find him-
self on a bench on a hill overlooking
the city. The voices of Paris begin to
speak through him. (“I am the undocu-
mented immigrant,” “I am the teenager
indivisible from his wheelchair,” “I am
a young virtuoso violinist,” “I am a
hobo perched on a hill.”) This is a trick
that Despentes uses often in her work:
she writes from the perspective of the
marginalized, then makes you see that
the margins overwhelm the center.
When I lived in Paris, my then girl-
friend brought me to that exact hill,
that exact bench. This was part of the
book’s charm, that the Paris contained
within was recognizable: the disaf-
fected urban landscape torn apart by
economic instability and the increasing
alienation of the Internet.
Despentes has been quick to say
that these books, unlike her earlier
work, are finally being taken seriously
solely because the protagonist is a
man. Today reporters ask her whether
she has become embourgeoisée, and
she says of course she has: she has
slowed down and softened, she eats
at the restaurants she once walked
past in disdain. One French academic
told me, with a sigh of genuine regret,
“Despentes could write a great book,
but I don’t think she ever will.” I agree,Pigalle, Paris’s red-light district, 2018Thomas Dworzak/Magnum Photos