Cher connard
Cher connard (Dear Dickhead) is Virginie Despentes's 2022 novel, her return to fiction after the Vernon Subutex trilogy. Told entirely through letters and blog posts, it opens with a hostile exchange: Rebecca, a famous, aging actress, and Oscar, a novelist recently and publicly accused of sexual harassment by his former publicist, Zoé, begin writing to each other with mutual contempt.
Against every expectation, the correspondence deepens. Over months of letters, the two circle round addiction and recovery, fame and aging, feminism and its backlash, social-media pile-ons, and the slow, unglamorous work of trying to become a better person — while Zoé's own voice, refusing to be spoken over, cuts through the exchange.
Sharp, funny, and more generous than her earlier work, Cher connard is a novel about friendship built in unlikely places and about the reckonings of the post-#MeToo moment. It became one of the biggest French literary successes of its year and appeared in English as Dear Dickhead.
A famous, aging film actress who strikes up a combative and then unexpectedly intimate letter-writing correspondence with Oscar.
A novelist publicly accused of sexual harassment, who reaches out to Rebecca and, through their letters, confronts his own conduct and his addictions.
Oscar's former publicist, whose blog gives voice to the woman at the center of the harassment accusation.