Down – if not out – in Paris

Virginie Despentes remains best known in this country for her 1993 debut novel, Baise-Moi, about two abused young women who set off on an orgiastically murderous road-trip round France. In 2000, she became notorious when she collaborated on the hardcore film of the book, which ran into certification problems, with Alexander Walker fulminating about the complete collapse of public decency.

Despentes has now published some 15 novels altogether, celebrated in France as grunge or ‘trash’ fiction — and a polemical, erratically feminist, memoir, King Kong Theory, describing her own experience of rape and prostitution, and calling for a new aggression in female sexuality.

When she was 35, Despentes (a pseudonym, referring to a quarter in Lyon where she was a sex worker) came out as a lesbian, saying it was nice not to be bothered about male approval any more and a relief not to be preoccupied with ageing — so much harder for heterosexuals, she claimed.