Welcome friend! I first heard about I Who Have Never Known Men in an article discussing its rising popularity. A translated work from French, it is a post-apocalyptic story narrated by a nameless woman. Drawn to its themes of isolation and survival, I suggested it as a buddy read with Ariel. Take a look at the synopsis and then dive into our discussion.
Jacqueline Harpman | Goodreads
Deep underground, thirty-nine women live imprisoned in a cage. Watched over by guards, the women have no memory of how they got there, no notion of time, and only a vague recollection of their lives before.
As the burn of electric light merges day into night and numberless years pass, a young girl—the fortieth prisoner—sits alone and outcast in the corner. Soon she will show herself to be the key to the others’ escape and survival in the strange world that awaits them above ground.
Jacqueline Harpman was born in Etterbeek, Belgium, in 1929, and fled to Casablanca with her family during WWII. Informed by her background as a psychoanalyst and her youth in exile, I Who Have Never Known Men is a haunting, heartbreaking post-apocalyptic novel of female friendship and intimacy, and the lengths people will go to maintain their humanity in the face of devastation. Back in print for the first time since 1997, Harpman’s modern classic is an important addition to the growing canon of feminist speculative literature.
I Who Have Never Known Men – Discussion
Ariel: Something that I’ve loved about our buddy reads throughout the years is we find ourselves gravitated towards the more “quiet” side of post-apocalyptic literature. For example, we’ve read Station Eleven, The Memory Police, and The Annual Migration of Clouds duology. Each of these stories, including I Who Have Never Known Men all contribute a thoughtful examination to what it means to be human when much of what we know as readers has been changed or lost.
Kriti: I Who Have Never Known Men has a lot to offer and I too see how it connects to books we have previously read. It has the appeal of a slow post-apocalyptic story with a dystopian edge. In the beginning, the women are in bunkers with rations and guards make it look like there was some thought and order put into their placement. But once they are free, they discover themselves to be the only survivors on the land. This gives the story the post-apocalyptic feel of navigating a place after an unknown calamity that killed everyone else. I found the writing immersive and hypnotic.
“I was as much a prisoner outside this empty land as I had been in the cage during my early years.”
I Who Have Never Known Men
What I found fascinating about this book was that the author wrote this thirty years ago, so the world that the author was speculating about through her book was quite different from what we experience today. But ultimately, I think a theme rings clear: knowledge and experiencing something first hand versus hearing about what “used to be” secondhand; and the grief that accompanies what was lost. Many of the women struggle to share with our main character how things used to be, and every glimmer of information is valuable to her.
The women’s lack of articulation of their past experience to the narrator makes this so sad and isolating. This helps her grow in a fearless manner. She is highly intelligent and innovative and learns from the women, especially the ones who are willing to teach her. The women reminisce of the time before they were captured, the normalcy of life back then with their families and the work they used to do but not much is specific enough to be usable now. Having no connection to the past, our protagonist craves knowledge, even if she cannot use it. She is unafraid of exploring the bunkers and land, having known nothing else.
I also found it interesting that we never found out what happened in the end. Was there a nuclear bomb that went off? Is the main character truly the last human on earth? So many questions raised, and many times our main character is only met with more questions. I appreciated this theme the most: sometimes, terrible things in life will just happen and there isn’t really a rational explanation for them. We just have to keep going and learning and journeying through life as we navigate, and it’s okay not to have all the answers.
That is a good summary of the theme. As nice as it would be to know why something happened, our protagonist moves forward with the knowledge she has. As the only one remaining for a long time, she takes however long it takes to learn new things. I enjoyed her meditations on the assumptions she and the women made about their prisons and guards, as well as the concept of time and womanhood.
“The alternation of day and night is merely a physical phenomenon, time is a question of being human and, frankly, how could I consider myself a human being, I who have only known thirty-nine people and all of them women? I think that time must have something to do with the duration of pregnancies, the growth of children, all those things that I haven’t experienced. If someone spoke to me, there would be time, the beginning and end of what they said to me, the moment when I answered, their response. The briefest conversation creates time.”
I Who Have Never Known Men
I also enjoyed the commentary on womanhood and motherhood. One of the reasons the protagonist suspects the women initially snub her is because she reminds them of their children that they are separated from — she is a painful reminder of what they once had. Growing up in capacity, her lack of menstruation further highlighted her detachment from traditional female experiences.
“Perhaps you never have time when you are alone? You only acquire it by watching it go by in others.”
I Who Have Never Known Men
As a new mom, this quote resonated deeply with me. Time with a newborn moves in rhythms of feeding, sleeping, and soothing—short, repetitive cycles of two-four hours that blur the days into weeks that quickly become months. In these early months, my sense of time felt more cyclical, much like the protagonist’s experience in the bunker. Her realization that time is shaped by human interaction—by conversation, by shared experiences—made me reflect on how motherhood has reshaped my own perception of time. My sleepy baby from a few days old is now a smiling alert baby, engaging with me and my partner in just two months.
Our main character also grows up as the youngest in a group of 39 other women. Her desires to learn and grow from the experiences of the other women, especially after they leave their bunker, are at war with her desires to continue to explore and see what else is out there. After she outlives all the other women, she is able to go out and see what there is to see, and she finds a bunker that appears to be for wealthy people that she’s able to spend the rest of her days in. She has access to many of the luxuries she was told about her whole life, and she ultimately dies content. What did you think of the ending?
I felt like it was the perfect ending for a story where only one person survives. When I first started this book, I was hopeful that she would come across someone in her wandering on the land and though she did find many people in the course of her life, their silence only added to the questions she had. I liked that her scavenger years eventually led her to a more comforting resting place.
While inclusive perceptions of feminism have widely evolved since the author wrote this book; the narrative challenges the reader alongside the main character as the story goes on in several existential ways. Like many of these thoughtful post-apocalyptic novels, I Who Have Never Known Men leaves us with more thoughts to ponder beyond the final page. Thank you, Kriti, for recommending this book for discussion; it was a delight as always!
Thanks for reading our discussion! Let us know what you think of this book and add it to your Goodreads if you would like to read it.
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