Jacqueline Harpman has been dead for 14 years, but she’s living every author’s dream.
She has a new short story collection — “We Were Forbidden” (out now) — a novel that’s become a bestselling phenom thanks to social media and three more books in the pipeline.
Harpman, a Belgian-Jewish writer and trained psychoanalyst, died of cancer in 2012 at the age of 82. More than a decade later, she became a BookTok sensation with the re-release of her dystopian novel, “I Who Have Never Known Men.”
Since going viral, the book has sold roughly 600,000 copies — the type of numbers usually reserved for Hollywood-endorsed beach reads, blockbuster spy novels and juicy celebrity memoirs — and it’s still reaching new readers, according to publisher Transit Books.
“This is certainly the most commercial success she’s ever received,” Transit’s publisher Adam Levy told The Post, describing Harpman as “well-respected” during her lifetime.
Levy plucked “I Who Have Never Known Men” from the backlist catalogue of Harpman’s French publisher, expecting the dark novel, which follows 40 women imprisoned in an underground bunker, clinging to their humanity as they’re prohibited from talking, touching or singing, to appeal to Transit’s core audience of literary-minded book buyers.
He credits the pandemic — “we were all in a way trapped in our own little bunkers” — for springboarding Harpman’s posthumous literary fame.
Levy said Transit will publish three more of Harpman’s books over the next three years. He’s excited for readers to glimpse a different side of the author in “We Were Forbidden.” It opens bleakly with “The Ardennes Forest” — “a sibling of ‘I Who Have Never Known Men,’” according to Levy — but then branches out into an autobiographical story about a feisty teenager ruffling feathers while living in Morocco to escape World War II. The book ends with a risque tale, called “The Broom Closet,” about an upper crust Belgian adulteress.
“She has a little bit of a saucier side to her,” Levy said.
For TikTokker Carmin C., however, the stark sensibility of “I Who Have Never Known Men,” is what hooked her into Harpman’s writing.
“Our current political climate and social climate feels very dystopian,” said Carmin, a 29-year-old grad student living in Chicago, who shares her life, and literary recommendations, under the name CC’s Thoughts.
She’s posted about “I Who Have Never Known Men” a number of times. She said, “I think that [book] really mirrors what a lot of women are feeling in the current era.”
Read the full article here
