PLAYBOY
by Constance Debré
Translated by Holly James
Semiotext(e). 176 pages, $17.95
LOVE ME TENDER
by Constance Debré
Translated by Holly James
Semiotext(e). 168 pages, $17.95
NAME
by Constance Debré
Translated by Lauren Elkin
Semiotext(e). 144 pages, $17.95
THE IMAGE beckoned: a closely shaved head in profile, double hoop earrings, handwritten neck tattoo above a crisp Oxford collar, typography following the curve of the cranium: Love Me Tender. It was French writer Constance Debré featured on the cover of her first novel translated into English. While the graphics grabbed me, it was the author’s singular voice and the radical simplicity of her enterprise that kept me reading—and made me want more. Now Debré’s trilogy—Playboy, Love Me Tender, and Name—is available in English translations.
With each book hovering near 150 pages, these are swift but immersive reads. Brevity is a signature of Debré’s style. Many chapters are a single paragraph, most a few pages. Genre is another economy: in these autofictional novels, author, narrator, and main character are one. Luckily, Debré fascinates and, like any good protagonist, changes over time. Throughout the trilogy, she develops multiple themes, cutting with control from one to the next. One theme is her life transformation, a second the disintegration of her aristocratic family, and a third the existence of poverty and crime in France along with wealth and social justice. These themes intertwine, though each book has its areas of concentration. Playboy depicts the metamorphosis of two love affairs. Love Me Tender includes the parade of lovers and the loss of her son through divorce. Name explores deep family history and the death of her father.
The narrator is a forty-something Parisian who has radically changed her life. Debré’s bio says she “left her career as a lawyer to become a writer,” but that’s understatement. She also left her husband, her son, heterosexuality, and her bourgeois lifestyle. She doesn’t write much about married life, but in glimpses we see that the couple shared amusement at the depth of their own boredom. When Debré writes about this, she uses words ranging from ennui, literal boredom, to s’emmerder, with the vulgar sense of being bored shitless.
Writing about her changed life, Debré makes real the austerity she needs to live and write. Many of us are so glutted with possessions that it would be absurd to list them, but Debré repeatedly runs down her short inventory. She wants close to nothing, has abandoned the trappings of domesticity, dumped her lawyerly apparel, and retains only iconic basics: jeans, T-shirts, swim gear, laptop. When possessions accumulate, she purges them. Keeping her load light, she moves among low-rent studios and borrowed flats to the peaceful rooms of a writer’s residency to her father’s run-down house.
This austere life, the narrator tells us, can be emotionally trying, but it’s what she’s decided to do. What she calls “the system” is akin to the code followed in Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises by protagonist Jake Barnes, who has personal courage, can hold his liquor, and knows how things work. Debré’s system is primarily about keeping life clear for reading and writing, but it extends into exercising, not drinking (much), listening to Bach, and “shaving her head every eight days on setting number 2.” The narrator thinks it’s important to be tough and strong. She admires people who drive well. Tattoos, in her view, ought to be bad, “like graffiti on the back of a toilet door.” For the record, she hates emojis.
Swimming is the backbone of her system. She got the idea from a gay friend who swims every day. “I told myself,” she writes, “that I would be a different person if I were capable of doing that.” She becomes a devoted swimmer. Across the trilogy, we dive with her into the lanes of municipal pools. When Debré writes about swimming, time slows, and she brings us close to her perception of her body gliding weightlessly through water. We experience her improving, becoming stronger, and integrating being a swimmer into her identity. The scent of chlorine seems to cling to the pages. One lover becomes jealous and tries to keep the narrator up late to disrupt her aquatic routine.
Another aspect of the system is letting events happen—and by events, the narrator largely means women. Debré is adept at evoking immersion in the body’s sensations to the exclusion of all else. When the narrator is in love, the twoness becomes all-consuming until it becomes too much. Then she returns to her system, to swimming, to a kind of erotic self-discipline.
Love Me Tender depicts a parade of lovers that the narrator records in a list complete with demographic tags. Debré writes entertainingly about sex, about bodies when desire is present and absent. Some of her best writing is about falling out of love. Even as she traces the passionate start of a love affair, she drops details that make us see the end forming like a storm on the horizon, details that offend the system—an unpleasant odor, an unseemly gift, or a text with the hated smile emoji.
As Debré writes about her transformed present, she also reflects on her childhood and heritage, drawing a portrait of the aristocrat as a young lesbian. Her parents accepted her early desire to look and play as boys typically do. Her father took her thrifting for army clothes. Her mother confirmed that “it was OK to love girls if you’re a girl.” During summers at her mother’s Basque country château, wearing a beret and espadrilles, the narrator would fall in with the local boys, ride horseback, and “piss standing up like a boy.” After the château burned down, they would go to Touraine, the paternal seat, where her grandmother bred dogs and her grandfather, prime minister under de Gaulle, would extoll the virtues of France. Discrete memories assemble into a picture of bygone wealth: “swans in the moat,” “liveries, gold and blue, the family colors,” and “nineteenth-century paintings.”
The story of Debré’s parents, born into this aristocratic milieu, begins as a romance—he was a journalist, she a model—but descends into a history of addiction and decline from opium to heroin to whisky and pills, concluding with intravenous doses of morphine that the narrator gives her father on his deathbed. She never lashes out at her parents, except in a satirical fantasy scene in which she excoriates the whole family with an explicit coming-out speech. She lashes out instead at childhood, at family itself—she wants them eliminated.
Parsing the narrator’s emotions can be challenging. Having made much of her aristocratic heritage, having depicted the severity of her parents’ addictions, their harrowing fall to poverty, the narrator confounds us: “I would have written the same book with any other parents,” Debré writes. Notable among her few possessions is a rarified collection of artifacts that embody her aristocratic heritage: Rolex watch, Church’s shoes, Habit Rouge cologne.
No one else is writing quite like Debré, but I’d shelve her work near Edward St. Aubyn, Édouard Louis, Garth Greenwell, and the late Heather Lewis. In her provocative trilogy, she writes about disintegration and transformation and gives us herself as a character, a phoenix from the flames, continuing her family name.
Lori O’Dea, a fiction writer and critic in Chicago, has appeared in LIBER, The Massachusetts Review, Rain Taxi, Bridge, and others.
