Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Dear Dickhead (French: Cher Connard) opens with a scathing Instagram post. A man writes that he spotted a famously beautiful actress in a Paris café, and that she has become “a wrinkled toad”.To his shock, the actress reads the post and emails him a dismissive, daggered “Dear Dickhead” letter (“I’m sure you’ve got kids. Guys like you always reproduce”). Thus begins Virginie Despentes’ engrossing epistolary novel, told mostly through missives between the actress, Rebecca, who’s approaching 50, and the man, Oscar, a homely, reasonably successful novelist in his early forties who has just been #MeToo’ed.These two have a back story: Oscar was the much younger brother of Rebecca’s childhood best friend. They both hail from feckless working-class families in the same provincial French city. Whereas Rebecca has forgotten that Oscar existed, he has assiduously tracked her career — her escape from their seemingly dead-end milieu convinced him that he could get out too.This is French author Virginie Despentes’ 11th novel (she has also published essays, screenplays and other works) and it touches on familiar themes: men’s permanent sexual threat to women; the coerced performance of femininity; how our looks shape our lives.It also tracks part of Despentes’ own biography. The daughter of provincial postal workers, she dropped out of high school to follow the punk music scene. Age 17, while she was hitchhiking back from London, three men raped her and a friend at gunpoint. This event became an obsession and a crucible.[The novel] gets too soap-boxy at times. Yet it has an introspective, slow-reveal style, and it’s often funnyFor about two years in her early twenties, Despentes was an occasional prostitute. It beat working in a supermarket; she liked that “access to my body had acquired extreme importance”; and she experienced tenderness from lonely men. Despentes was still turning tricks when she wrote her first novel, Baise-moi (literally: “Fuck Me”). The 1993 book, dubbed “feminist pulp” and published by a tiny independent press, starts with a strangling and a gang rape, then follows the two young female protagonists as they go on a murderous rampage across France. The book and its gory 2000 film adaptation, which Despentes co-directed with a porn actress, scandalised French audiences and turned Despentes into an improbable cultural sensation.“I write as an ugly one, for the ugly ones,” she declares in her electrifyingly blunt 2006 manifesto King Kong Theory, in which she presages the current challenges to gender and rejects the idea that rape must permanently crush a woman. Her own rape, she writes, was “both that which disfigures me and that which makes me”. Dear Dickhead tracks these themes into middle age and worldly success — Despentes won the 2010 Prix Renaudot, among others, and was elected to the elite academy that awards the Prix Goncourt. At 55, she is still lancing the patriarchy, and her writing remains highly acute. But it has become more sober, patient and full of emotional suspense.Rebecca, the actress, is a classic Despentes character and avatar: brutally analytical, unapologetically sexual, and allergic to self-care (“I’d rather die than do pilates,” she writes). She has spent her life shooting heroin, ditching lovers and living in the suspended reality of film sets.Now she’s reckoning with the sell-by date of all that: she’s passed over for roles and chastened when “I looked into the eyes of an ex-lover and saw something like indifference”. Even getting high has gotten dull.Oscar stands accused of sexually harassing a young woman named Zoé when, a decade earlier, she handled press for his breakout novel. He insists that he’s really the injured party, since Zoé rejected him. Rebecca has little patience for Oscar’s woes. “You want to know what it’s like to be cancelled?” she quips. “Talk to any actress my age.”The sexual harasser gets his comeuppance, but to her credit Despentes also empathises with her would-be villain. She gives Zoé — whose blog posts appear in the book — an ambiguous fate as well. Zoé’s online persona is brazen. (“It’s absurd that young women might contemplate suicide just because someone has photos of them having sex with guys they fancy.”) After an army of angry men swarm her comments section, however, she ends up in a mental hospital.Zoé’s story leads Rebecca, who is a generation older, to reckon with bad behaviour she once overlooked. “We were told, ‘No feminism, it turns men off,’ and we said, ‘Don’t worry, Daddy, I won’t bother anyone with my little problems.’”Dear Dickhead gets too soap-boxy at times. Yet it has an introspective, slow-reveal style, and it’s often funny. There are digs on watching your friends age (“it’s a lot like adolescence, only more disgusting”) and modern parenting (“at least our parents didn’t rely on us to feel like good people, or to fill some kind of vacuum”). Frank Wynne delivers a finely tuned translation; although, as an American, I had to look up the recurring phrase “off my face”.After their initial bitterness and distrust, Oscar and Rebecca gradually open up to each other in long, vulnerable, often moving missives. She eventually calls him “my dickhead friend”. Though they’ve still never met in person as adults, “you’ve become the person closest to me,” Oscar admits.“It’s mutual,” she writes back, “Let’s face it, we’re getting to be pretty inseparable.”This is what makes Despentes and her characters so appealing: they act as if they have nothing to lose yet it’s clear they do.Dear Dickhead by Virginie Despentes, translated by Frank Wynne MacLehose Press £18.99, 304 pagesJoin our online book group on Facebook at FT Books Café and subscribe to our podcast Life and Art wherever you listen
