I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman

I Who Have Never Felt So Depressed In All My Life.

Wow is the first word that came to mind when I sat down to write this review. I have to be honest, this is a book I picked up purely because of the hype on BookTok (something I usually take with a grain of salt), but I’m so glad I did. BookTok, you have officially regained my trust after Powerless.

Anyhoo! In I Who Have Never Known Men, author Jacqueline Harpman transports us to a world where life is reduced to its most basic functions: eat, sleep, shit, repeat. Every single comfort, distraction, and certainty has been stripped away and what we’re left with is a simple, brutal question: when everything that gives life meaning is gone, what does it mean to be human?

Deep dive on I Who Have Never Known Men (spoiler-free)

The value of thinking

The women in the bunker are denied not just comfort but dignity. They have no answers, next to no memories, and no privacy. Their lives have been reduced to endurance for survival’s sake, and yet traces of humanity persist. They’re given the same food to make a meal out of twice a day, every day, and still the women debate different ways to prepare the vegetables and meat, imagining tastier variations of the same watery stock.

It might sound a silly example, but it really struck me how they are given next to nothing and yet the women refuse to surrender their human instinct to think, to question, and to dream, even if it is over something as small as flavour.

In these scraps of conversation and imagination lies the novel’s quiet insistence that what makes us human and feel human is internal, even when external circumstances seem set up to erase it.

The search for meaning

This book was deeply introspective about what gives life meaning. What is our purpose? Why are we here?

From start to finish, the narrator is undergoing an existential quest. Deprived of family, culture, and knowledge of the outside world, she must invent and discover meaning for herself.

She has no memory and no explanation for her capture or what fate awaits her, leaving her with an insatiable curiosity about the world and her existence. Why she is here? With being so different from the older women, she often questions whether she is actually human at all.

At the bleakest points, her relentless commitment to understanding her existence and her pursuit of meaning are the only things keeping her moving forward.

Without giving anything away, at the end of the novel the narrator takes one final step to give her life meaning by writing down her story in hope that one day someone will find it, read it, and have her thoughts in their head. To have someone finally, truly, understand her existence.

This is where I teared up, because the author is telling us that in the face of our own mortality, life continues to have significance if it can be shared or understood by another mind. By putting her story onto paper, the narrator is saying I was here, and my life mattered to me.

Taking things for granted

Harpman made me think deeply about aspects of life I take for granted. Why are certain things so important, and other things are considered not so?

After having their memories erased and their lives ripped away from them, the women can’t remember much. But the strongest memories that permeates the mental nothingness of their lives before is what they remember about love and comfort. They remember, vaguely, about their husbands, the feeling of connection, their children, and how it feels to have a long, hot bath.

I kept thinking about how much of what I consider normal is actually incredibly fragile. Seeing my partner and daughter at the end of each work day is a given, facetiming my parents a couple nights a week is a given, a meal and a shower and a bed and a roof over my head is a given, the fact I’m going to wake up tomorrow is a given… but it’s not.

This scaffolding around which my life is built could be taken away at any moment and that thought scares the shit out of me. Sorry for going dark, but this is the exact kind of thinking this novel calls for and is why it’s going to stay with me for a long, long time.

General thoughts

For a book this incredible, the English lit student in me was SCREAMING for a deeper analysis of the books themes. Now that’s all off my chest, I’d like to get into something a little lighter!

I just adored this book. It was originally written in French, but the translator did an incredible job. The prose matched the bleakness and tragedy of the narrator’s circumstances perfectly without ever being melodramatic or victimy and the language matches the narrator’s lifelong fascination with knowledge without being pretentious.

This is not a story that ties itself into a nice little bow at the end, but the author forces us to sit in the discomfort of never knowing why alongside the characters.

I thought I would hate a book where I didn’t get any answers, but I didn’t. I’ve truly never read anything quite like this and I can’t imagine reading anything like it again.

Final verdict on I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman

I Who Have Never Known Men is a novel that will stay with me for a very, very long time. It left me unsettled, deeply reflective, and acutely aware of how much of my life I take for granted.

This is not a book for answers, but it is one that insists again and again we think about what it means to be human.