Bye Bye Blondie by Virginie Despentes

Bye Bye Blondie by Virginie Despentes

In a wrecked modern version of a romance novel, acclaimed French writer Virginie Despentes pokes at the simultaneous ecstasy and banality of love in an age of psychiatry and punk.

Gloria lives in seething rage, lashing out at everyone--particularly, a string of bewildered boyfriends--at the local bar. But when her latest explosion leaves her out on the street, she unexpectedly runs into famed television personality Eric Muir. Incidentally, he's also her teenage boyfriend, and the one who started it all.

Once upon a time, Gloria and Eric met while institutionalized, and then became a mascot couple for those homeless and high on a noisy mix of drugs, music, and counterculture. Now, twenty years later, Gloria is enamored by youthful love resurrected and determined to immortalize their story by writing a screenplay. Whisked away to Paris, she's transformed from a provincial loose cannon into an urbane party guest. But navigating life and love isn't any easier for the middle-aged. Cutting deep to unearth the marriage of institutional violence and heterosexual relationships, Bye Bye Blondie illustrates how young women are continuously dragged down and neglected, and then dangled false offers of fame in lieu of real, redemptive recognition.

Virginie Despentes is a filmmaker and writer. She worked in an independent record store in the early 1990s, was a sex worker, and at the age of twenty-three, she published her first novel, Baise Moi. In 2000, she co-directed the film adaptation of the novel with porn star Coralie Trinh Thi. It was the first picture to be banned in France in twenty-eight years when it was released. Despentes is also the author of Apocalypse Baby, Bye Bye Blondie, Beautiful Things, and the Vernon Subutex trilogy, among other works.