In this week's edition of Endnotes, we take a look at Virginie Despentes's Dear Dickhead (FSG, Sept.), an epistolatory novel about addiction.

Here's how the book came together.

MITZI ANGEL, President and Publisher, FSG

“Reading Dear Dickhead in French, I could immediately sense how much energy had been stored away in its 300 pages. The book, if you’ll excuse the technical simile, is like a fully charged battery, hot to the touch in your hands.”

VIRGINIE DESPENTES, Author

“Dear Dickhead came out of a desire I had to write an essay about addictions. But as I read The Recovering by Leslie Jamison, I felt she’d already written the book I was dreaming of, so I wrote an epistolary novel: an exchange between two characters trapped in their respective realities. The idea was that the letters are bridges that allow them to change their perspectives.”

FRANK WYNNE, Translator

“Translation is always about voices. Attempting to capture the voice you hear when you read the original, and recreating that voice in another language. Virginie’s novels are made up of a choir of voices that range wildly in terms of age, social status, education, and political leanings, so conjuring all of these voices, ensuring they sound natural and convincing, while also ensuring that they sing in harmony, is the greatest, most difficult, and most exciting challenge.”

IAN VAN WYE, Associate Editor, FSG

“One of the principal aims of the editorial process was to devise a version of the text that would work in the U.S. and Canada—there are some small stylistic differences between the North American and the British and Irish editions, and my role consisted of flagging the occasional word or turn of phrase that seemed palpably transatlantic in a way that might distract or relocate a North American reader’s mind from France to somewhere across the Channel.”

ALEX MERTO, Art Director, FSG and Picador

“For the final cover, we wanted something big, bold, and typographic, aligning with the U.K. publisher’s cover while creating our own unique take. The design we chose represents the exchange of letters, the primary mode of communication between the characters.”