After reading my second book by Marie NDiaye I am firmly convinced that this woman plays by no rules except her own when it comes to writing and I love it. I’ve read that Self-Portrait in Green is NDiaye’s response to be asked to write a memoir which, if true, she proceeded to say ‘fuck your standard memoir’ and delivered this dream-like narrative peppered by various ‘women in green’.

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These women in green show up in different periods of the narrator’s life (who may or may not even be NDiaye - who knows for sure? Not me). One is a woman who passed away 10 years ago. One is a former best friend who then married the narrator’s father and became her step mother. One is a cruel teacher from her past. All of them allow us to glimpse the inner workings of the narrator’s mind, her rocky relationships with her parents, her fears and doubts and anxieties.

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I do love it when an author does not feel the need to hold the hand of their reader. NDiaye is firmly in this category of non-hand-holders, allowing her readers to be swept up in the flood of green, leaving us to interpret it as we will. Did parts of it go over my head? Absolutely! But that doesn’t mean I want NDiaye to provide more clarity, it just means I want to reread it and see what else I can unearth from this unearthly piece of writing!

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Translated masterfully once again by Jordan Stump