"I Who Have Never Known Men" Is a Warning

"I still have that copy; I've carried it through half a dozen states and a dozen moves and uncountable phases of my life. Twenty-seven years later, its pages are vanilla-sweet, from the decaying lignin; the imprint was long ago absorbed into another. But "I Who Have Never Known Men," which was first published thirty years ago, in French, has found new life."

"A younger generation of readers has lately taken to proselytizing about the book on TikTok; a reissue sold a hundred thousand copies in the U.S. alone in 2024. It is a wild turn of events for a relatively obscure work of literature in translation which was published here by a small press. And yet I'm not surprised. After all, it's a book about finding yourself at the end of the world."

"The child at the heart of the novel is an adult when the book opens. She is dying. The text we are reading, we learn, is a kind of poioumenon, a story about its own making, written in her final month. Without so much as a chapter break, we return to her childhood: she lives in a panopticon-a cage in a bunker where there is no true night or day and no privacy, guarded by men who never speak."

I Who Have Never Known Men follows a nameless girl who was captured as a child and kept with older women in a windowless cage. The narrative opens with her as an adult, dying, and presents the story as a final-month manuscript that returns to her childhood confinement. The women remember the world before captivity; the girl has no memory or name. The novel blends dystopian setting, ritualized surveillance, and fragmented poetics to examine memory, identity, and survival. A French publication decades old found renewed popularity through social media and a U.S. reissue.

Read at The New Yorker