Despentes, Virginie

The French author Virginie Despentes was born in Nancy, northeast France. She was convinced from an early age that girls are no different from boys. This was at a time when women only recently could open their own bank accounts without the signature of a father or a husband. As a teenager, she left Nancy for Lyon where she went feral. She "became a prostitute, walked the streets in low-cut tops, hitchhiked, was raped and hitchhiked again". When she contracted an unbecoming skin disease, she had to move back home to her parents. She locked herself in the house and wrote her first book to avoid showing herself in public.