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After the triumph of Vernon Subutex‘s trilogy, Virginie Despentes makes a significant return with these ultra-modern Dangerous Relationships. This novel is a tale of fury and consolation, anger and acceptance, where friendship is stronger than human frailties.
“I read what you wrote on your Insta. You’re like a pigeon that shat on my shoulder as I walked by: smelly and very unpleasant. Boohoo, boohoo, boohoo, I’m a loudmouth who everyone ignores all over him, and I squeal like a chihuahua to get noticed. Glory and honor to social media: you’ve earned fifteen minutes of fame. Proof? I’m sitting here now writing to you.”
After the triumph of Vernon Subutex‘s trilogy, Virginie Despentes makes a significant return with these ultra-modern Dangerous Relationships. This novel is a tale of fury and consolation, anger and acceptance, where friendship is stronger than human frailties.
“Like Vernon Subutex, Dear Asshole is a hymn to friendship, to that bond that can at least make man less of an asshole and life more bearable, that is, save it. Blending themes, character voices, and linguistic idioms, Dear Asshole is a luminous novel of great nobility. This may seem like an oxymoron regarding Virginie Despentes, but it’s not.”
Le Monde
Despentes reinforces or rather dynamizes the epistolary form, beloved of 18th-century moralistic writers with her electrifying and precise writing, giving Dear Asshole the weight of an insightful essay for our times. The words of Rebecca, Oscar, and Zoé go into great depth as they discuss the critical issues of the #MeToo era, of embattled feminism and the redefinition of masculinity, of pack violence as it appears on social media, and of increasingly triumphant liberalism.
A novel composed of an exchange of emails between a writer and an actress, two people lonely and troubled by life and time. A powerful testimony to our time and its dead ends. A hymn to friendship. A triumphant display of literary prowess.
Virginie Despentes, this leading figure of the feminist renaissance, proves that she can simultaneously be both radical and consensual, calling for an end to the gender war after #MeToo.
Virginie Despentes writes like she’s stepping into the ring. With her novel Dear Asshole, she reborn the epistolary novel against the backdrop of quarantine to bring out courageous opinions and, ultimately, to compose a hymn to dialogue and detachment. A confrontation brimming with clever lines and tenderness. Brilliant and effective.
Virginie Despentes chooses the epistolary form in this novel. This choice might seem outdated, bringing to mind Madame de Sévigné or George Sand, but correspondence today has moved to the keyboard and the screen. You could say that Despentes modernizes Dangerous Liaisons: a woman and a man correspond on the back of a younger woman. Here, we don’t have a Machiavellian plot, but the author uses a proficient method to effectively unfold all her views on feminism, addictions, and old age.
Virginie Despentes
