“Eat Your Words”: Body Desertion, Binge Writing and Orthorexia in Marie Darrieussecq’s Truismes (1996)

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Women in crisis in contemporary French literature tend to neglect their needs through desertion—of the body, of eating, emotions, sex, reality, and writing—while consequentially overindulging to reassemble such abandonment. This dichotomy transfigures into Marie Darriessecq’s Truismes [Pig Tales] (1996), in which the physical transformation of a woman into a sow is undoubtedly external and overtly communicated in the plot, but as evident deeper within its textual economy, this metamorphosis is equally as internal and mental. Desertion, then, as both symbol and symptom, elucidates the paradoxical themes of starvation and reassembling, in which the female body is deprived of what it needs to function, yet she must overindulge to compensate for such desertion. As I seek to argue through tracking these two diametrically opposed themes of pain in Truismes, starvation and one’s engagement in disordered eating is not always about vanity, but rather about control of their body or the lack thereof.