Self-Portrait in Green: A Conversation on the Work of Marie NDiaye
This event will take place on Zoom. Registration required.
In celebration of the 10th Anniversary hard cover edition of Marie NDiaye’s genre-defying classic, Self-Portrait in Green, writers Alexandra Kleeman, Giada Scodellaro, and Jennifer Wilson talk about the influential work of the French author with her primary English translator, Jordan Stump.
Who are the green women? They are powerful (one is a disciplinarian teacher). They are mysterious (one haunts a house like a ghost). They are seductive (one marries her best friend’s father). And they are unbearably personal (one is the author’s own mother).
They are all aspects of their creator: Marie NDiaye, an author celebrated worldwide as one of France’s leading writers. In Self-Portrait in Green, her own skewed take on the memoir, NDiaye combs through all the menacing, beguiling, and revelatory memories submerged beneath the consciousness of a singular literary talent. Mysterious, honest, and unabashedly innovative, NDiaye’s self-portrait forces us all to ask questions—about what we repress, how we discover those things, and how those obsessions become us.
Co-presented by Brookline Booksmith’s Transnational Literature Series.
Marie NDiaye was born in 1967 in Pithiviers, France. She is the author of around twenty novels, plays, collections of stories, and nonfiction books, which have been translated into numerous languages. She’s received the Prix Femina and the Prix Goncourt, France’s highest literary honor, and her plays are in the repertoire of the Comédie-Française.
Jordan Stump has translated many authors into English from French, including Marie Redonnet, Eric Chevillard, and Honoré de Balzac. His translation of Jardin des Plantes by Claude Simon won the 2001 French-American Foundation translation prize, and he was named a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Artes et des Lettres in 2006. His English language translations of works by Marie NDiaye have been nominated for the International Booker Prize twice. Ladivine was longlisted for the prize in 2016, and The Witch was shortlisted in 2026.
Alexandra Kleeman is the author of the novel You Too Can Have A Body Like Mine, the story collection Intimations, and most recently a climate dystopian novel, Something New Under the Sun, which was named one of the New York Times’ Notable Books of 2021. She is the recipient of a Rome Prize, Berlin Prize, and Guggenheim fellowship, and lives in Colorado and Staten Island.
Giada Scodellaro was born in Naples, Italy and raised in the Bronx, New York. Giada’s work has appeared in or is forthcoming from The New Yorker, BOMB, Harper’s, and Granta, among other publications. Giada is a recipient of a MacDowell Fellowship, and is the inaugural Tables of Contents Regenerative Residency Fellow. Some of Them Will Carry Me is her first book.
Jennifer Wilson is a contributing essayist at The New York Times Book Review.