“I Who Have Never Known Men” Is a Warning
When my twelve-year-old self picked up “I Who Have Never Known Men” from a church rummage sale in 1998, I was certain it was a book written for children. I don’t remember why. Maybe it came from a pile of young-adult books, misfiled by a volunteer. Or maybe the book itself, a $3.99 mass-market paperback from Avon’s science-fiction imprint, felt like it was being marketed to me specifically: a gauzy-pastel cover with a provocative title and a gnarly summary on the back, promising me a young woman mired in mysterious circumstances in a dystopian world.
Either way, the book enticed me and then inflamed me—I had never read anything like it. 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. Captured long before she had memory, the child is surrounded by women much older than her. They have memories of the world before they came to the cage; she has none. They have names; she is nameless.
But even the women who, before, had spouses and children and worked as shop assistants and typists and factory workers cannot quite name the circumstances of their imprisonment. They mention “screams, flames, a stampede” in the middle of an otherwise ordinary night, “growing terror,” “people running in all directions,” “strange drugs” that created false memories. Now, after, they argue about whether there was a war; they wonder if they’re even on Earth. “There’s my day-to-day life,” one woman remembers, “and then a sort of panic which I’ve always been terrified of reliving. Then, I’m here, lying on a mattress and everything feels perfectly normal.”
As for the child, well. She is a mystery, the only one of her kind. No memory of the event or the before. She is ferocious, almost feral, motherless but with thirty-nine mothers, like an ancient curse. She yearns for knowledge, and the women ceaselessly discuss among themselves how they might go about her education. Every detail they withhold incenses her. With no language for her loss, she rages against their secrets (“anger was my only weapon against the horror”).
Then she finds her own secrets. While creating stories in her mind, she invents sexual fantasy, running scenarios over and over until she reaches what she calls “eruption.” She learns how to keep time, another thing that has been snatched from all of them. She develops a plan to stare at one of the guards, the youngest of them, to provoke a response. Pleasure, orientation, agency: all conjured out of nothing, and despair.
Suddenly, in this endless stretch of sameness, a siren goes off. The guards leave the keys in the door and disappear. After a while, the women let themselves out and ascend to the surface. Above ground, the Earth—if it is Earth—is changed. Mild seasons. No animals. Barely any flowers. Endless land in every direction. And no men. Not anymore.
The women start walking. What else can they do? They find other bunkers, identical to their own—except that every other bunker has a locked cage of corpses, abandoned by their guards but with no way to escape. They talk about the civilization they will encounter—cities, other people—but they never do. With no answers forthcoming, they have no choice but to survive, and live: a prelapsarian life in a postlapsarian world. And as they create new lives for themselves—and eventually begin to fall, one by one—the child, who becomes a woman, knows that one day she will be really and truly alone. Then she is.
“I Who Have Never Known Men” was the first novel I didn’t know what to do with—the first novel that, instead of frightening me or thrilling me, gave me an unmooring sense of disquiet. I remember tearing through its pages, certain that we would get . . . something. A reveal. A massive info dump of explanation that, at twelve, I longed for. (I’d been reading Nancy Drew-and-Hardy Boys crossover mysteries; the solution was one of my favorite parts.) But nothing was resolved for me, not in the way I expected. The book, an enigma, remained in my possession as I moved closer and closer to the end of the world.
The book’s author, Jacqueline Harpman, was born in Belgium in 1929. (The book’s English translator is Ros Schwartz; she revised her translation in 2019.) Her father was Jewish, and the family fled to Morocco when the Nazis invaded Belgium, in 1940, staying there until the war was over. It is impossible to encounter the extreme circumstances of the women in “I Who Have Never Known Men” and not think of concentration camps, historical and contemporary.
