Many of Virginie Despentes\u2019s books revolve around the same central idea: \u201cTo be born a woman [is] the worst fate in practically every society.\u201d But this message is nearly always packaged in easy-to-read books that fill you with the pleasure of a trashy popular novel. The writing is straightforward, not overly literary, and yet by the end you realize all of Despentes\u2019s complex feminist points have not only been made, but have found their way into your mind, have changed something about the way you think. This is her genius.<\/p>\n
Despentes doesn\u2019t merely explore what it\u2019s like to be a woman in the world. Some of her books are about what it\u2019s like to be anyone in a world that keeps people unequal, whether they be men or women, rich or poor. They\u2019re about how everyone is affected, and affected negatively, by our society\u2019s status quo. Bye Bye Blondie<\/em> is one of these books.<\/p>\n Published by the Feminist Press earlier this month and translated from the French by Si\u00e2n Reynolds, Bye Bye Blondie<\/em> is a story about Gloria and Gloria\u2019s rage. At first we are made to think Gloria\u2019s outbursts are immature, the enactment of \u201cthe crazy girlfriend,\u201d costing her relationships with lovers, friends, and family. We learn Gloria was previously placed in a psychiatric hospital by her parents because of these outbursts. And yet as the book goes on, we realize Gloria\u2019s rage is incredibly right and true. It\u2019s the only sane course of action for anyone who sees the world for what it is.<\/p>\n It\u2019s when Gloria is locked away in a mental hospital for a few months that she starts to understand, to crack. There she starts to see the way of the world, how power operates. She realizes that to exist within the system is to betray herself; to get along with others, to have friends or boyfriends or money, she has to be someone else. In the most revealing scene of the book, the scene that feels most directly to have come from Despentes\u2019s life (her memoir King Kong Theory<\/em> starts out, \u201cI am writing as an ugly one for<\/em> the ugly ones\u201d), a specialist asks Gloria why she chooses to be ugly, why she is \u201crefusing to be a woman.\u201d Gloria doesn\u2019t respond, knowing it won\u2019t help her get out of the hospital, but Despentes tells us: \u201cBecause agreeing to be a woman means suffering in silence, not fighting back.\u201d And the reader knows this to be true: Gloria is in the hospital \u201cbecause [her] father started yelling at [her] and instead of keeping quiet, [she] answered back.\u201d<\/p>\n Her saving grace in the hospital is a young man named Eric, a rich boy who\u2019s temporarily lost his memory and remains there until his bourgeois parents come to rescue him. After he leaves, they begin to exchange letters. As main characters tend to do, they fall in love. Eric is the first person she\u2019s ever met who loves her \u201cprecisely for what she was most afraid of in herself.\u201d Namely, her rage, her distaste for the world, her ability to see the world and those playing into it for what they are. Because her rage soothes him, makes him think that he too holds the world at an ironic distance, that he too has not betrayed himself and does not live a life of compromise. Being with Gloria allows Eric to forget who his parents raised him to be. In turn, Eric lets Gloria feel it\u2019s okay to be herself.<\/p>\n Once Gloria is out of the mental hospital, they realize there\u2019s only one thing to do: run away. They live on the margins of society for a while. They\u2019re bums, they\u2019re poor, they\u2019re punk rockers, they\u2019re happy. Despentes tells us, \u201cAll this time, other people their age were learning to be competitive, disciplined, learning not to set their sights too high, not to ask questions, and that money is what matters most in this world. Eric and Gloria were learning nothing at all . . .\u201d<\/p>\n Suddenly Eric goes missing, and after months of searching for him, Gloria receives a letter from him saying he has decided to enter back into society, or in his words, \u201creality.\u201d In order to search for him, Gloria, too, re-enters society, where she\u2019ll remain, but always with a disdain for herself and everyone else living this \u201creality.\u201d Her outbursts of rage are against the world, but also against herself for giving in to what she calls the \u201cpure surrender\u201d of going along with this cruel world.<\/p>\n Twenty years later, Gloria and Eric run into each other in the street following one of her outbursts, and this is where the plot of Bye Bye Blondie<\/em> begins. They are now in different places in their lives\u2014Eric is a famous talk-show host who is incredibly depressed, and Gloria is a poor and barely functioning member of society living off of government aid. They have their ups and downs and their love story plays out over the course of the book. Gloria seems to be caught in a trap: as soon as she finds herself edging toward success, money, and acceptance in society, she loses herself more and more, and ends up flying off the handle in rebellion, landing back at square one. We watch Gloria and Eric explore how far they\u2019re willing to compromise before they wind up disgusted with themselves, Gloria manic and Eric depressive. But the most interesting thing Despentes does in Bye Bye Blondie<\/em> is show us how these two ultimately fit together. In this world, love does not conquer all, does not bridge differences. A soul mate is not someone who balances us, or shows us the beauty of the world. A soul mate isn\u2019t even someone who allows us to tolerate the world. Rather, a soul mate is someone who enables us to stomach the compromises we inevitably make to live within it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Many of Virginie Despentes\u2019s books revolve around the same central idea: \u201cTo be born a woman [is] the worst fate in practically every society.\u201d But this message is nearly always packaged in easy-to-read books that fill you with the pleasure of a trashy popular novel. The writing is straightforward, not overly literary, and yet by […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":166,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[67486],"tags":[64566,60166,3426,60146,64556,60136],"class_list":["post-304416","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","tag-bye-bye-blondie","tag-emma-ramadan","tag-french-literature","tag-sian-reynolds","tag-the-feminist-press","tag-virginie-despentes"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/304416","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/166"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=304416"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/304416\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":333196,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/304416\/revisions\/333196"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=304416"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=304416"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=304416"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}