The women in Leila Slimani’s novels are unhappy. The men are dissatisfied too, but they are secondary, more oblivious characters. The women are unhappy because their husbands don’t understand them, because their children are a burden on them, and because their existence strikes them as humiliatingly humdrum. They love those husbands and children, but their joy in their families is always short-lived and compromised. They daydream of free, glamorous, and extraordinary lives. The truth is that they aren’t sure what they want, exactly. They just know they do not—and almost surely cannot—have it.
Source : Family Values
