A novel of lesbian identity and motherhood and the societal pressures that place them in
opposition. The daughter of an illustrious French family whose members include a former Prime
Minister a model and a journalist Constance Debré abandoned her marriage and legal career in
2015 to write full-time and begin a relationship with a woman. Her transformation from affluent
career woman to broke single lesbian was chronicled in her 2018 novel Play boy praised by
Virginie Despentes for its writing that is at once “flippant and consumed by anxiety.” In Love
Me Tender Debré goes on to further describe the consequences of that life-changing decision.
Her husband Laurent seeks to permanently separate her from their eight-year old child.
Vilified in divorce court by her ex she loses custody of her son and is allowed to see him
only once every two weeks for a supervised hour. Deprived of her child Debré gives up her
two-bedroom apartment and bounces between borrowed apartments hotel rooms and a studio the
size of a cell. She involves herself in brief affairs with numerous women who vary in age body
type language and lifestyle. But the closer she gets to them the more distant she feels.
Apart from cigarettes and sex her life is completely ascetic: a regime of intense reading and
writing interrupted only by sleep and athletic swimming. She shuns any place where she might
observe children avoiding playgrounds and parks “as if they were cluster bombs ready to
explode riddling her body with pieces of shrapnel.” Writing graphically about sex rupture
longing and despair in the first person Debré’s work is often compared with the punk-era
writings of Guillaume Dustan and Herve Guibert whose work she has championed. As she says of
Guibert: “I love him because he says I and he’s a pornographer. That seems to be essential when
you write. Otherwise you don’t say anything.” But in Love Me Tender Debré speaks courageously
of love in its many forms reframing what it means to be a mother beyond conventional
expectations.
