Dear Dickhead: A Novel by Virginie Despentes (Translated by Frank Wynne) (9/10/24)

The French novel taking the world by storm: an ultracontemporary Dangerous Liaisons about sex, feminism, and addiction.

Dear Dickhead,
I read the piece you posted on your Insta. You’re like a pigeon shitting on my shoulder as you flap past. Congratulations: you've had your fifteen minutes of fame. The proof? The fact that I bothered to write to you.

Oscar is a B-list novelist in his forties. He used to be an alcoholic and a cokehead, but now he keeps himself busy by ranting on social media. When Rebecca, an actress whose looks he insulted, sends him an angry email, they strike up a combative correspondence—at the very moment that Oscar is accused of sexual harassment by his former publicist. What ensues is a no-holds-barred conversation about life under the patriarchy, and above all about addiction—to drugs, to alcohol, to the internet, to rage.

Virginie Despentes, the celebrated author of King Kong Theory, has written her breakthrough book: a Dangerous Liaisons for our time. We follow Rebecca and Oscar as they develop an unlikely friendship and argue over questions of right and wrong in a city—Paris—where pleasure, excess, and freedom rule the day, or used to. Dear Dickhead is a guns-blazing novel about a culture that makes men and women sick, and about how the search for feeling leaves us addicted to what makes us feel. The result is a provocative and unmissable book from the author hailed by The Guardian as France’s “rock and roll Zola.”