Dear Dickhead

A Novel

By: Virginie Despentes, Frank Wynne - translator

Narrated by: Gina Rogers, Patrick Zeller

The French novel taking the world by storm: an ultracontemporary Dangerous Liaisons about sex, feminism, and addiction.

Oscar is a B-list novelist in his forties. He used to be an alcoholic and a cokehead, but now he keeps himself busy by ranting on social media. When Rebecca, an actress whose looks he insulted, sends him an angry email, they strike up a combative correspondence—at the very moment that Oscar is accused of sexual harassment by his former publicist. What ensues is a no-holds-barred conversation about life under the patriarchy, and above all about addiction—to drugs, to alcohol, to the internet, to rage.

Virginie Despentes, the celebrated author of King Kong Theory, has written her breakthrough book: a Dangerous Liaisons for our time. We follow Rebecca and Oscar as they develop an unlikely friendship and argue over questions of right and wrong in a city—Paris—where pleasure, excess, and freedom rule the day, or used to. Dear Dickhead is a guns-blazing novel about a culture that makes men and women sick, and about how the search for feeling leaves us addicted to what makes us feel. The result is a provocative and unmissable book from the author hailed by the Guardian as France's "rock and roll Zola."

©2022 Virginie Despentes and Editions Grasset & Fasquelle; Translation copyright 2024 by Frank Wynne (P)2025 Highbridge Audio

Great reads

This is more about the audio book production. I also have a physical copy and I go back and forth. The order of the chapters doesn’t match, I think the audio book is wrong because the conversations don’t quite match up.