Despentes, who is French, is an occasional filmmaker, and she has demonstrated, for a literary author, a surprising agnosticism regarding that choice of medium, as if the difference between books and film or TV were a question not of kind but of degree. She told a public-radio host she’d intended for
Vernon Subutex a trilogy of some 1,240 pages to be a single, short book. But that’s the thing about writing, she said, contrasting it to movies: “You’re not limited by any budget. If you decide all of a sudden to go from 50 pages to 1,500, it’s a question of time and work.”