In the summer of 1973, the journalist Xavi_re Gauthier interviewed the writer and filmmaker Marguerite Duras for an article in Le Monde. The meeting began a productive friendship between the two women that included the recording of four more interviews. They spoke of writing, literature, criticism, film, madness, sex, desire, alienation, Marxism, the situation of women, and their "oppression by the phallic class." Published in 1974 in France as Les Parleuses, the book became a classic statement of a positive and politically forceful feminist stance and an influential exploration of how Western culture has constructed gender roles and dealt with sexuality.