Love Me Tender
Constance Debré
Translated by Holly James
Semiotext(e), 2022
Review by Thea McLachlan
“What is this insane world I’m living in?” Constance Debré asks midway through her memoir Love Me Tender (published by Semiotext(e), translated by Holly James). Caught in a custody battle with her ex, Laurent, and fed up with a legal system that both obstructs and twists the relationship she has with her child, Paul, Debré continues: “This world where love is transformed into silence even without death? This world where things just cease to exist.” In 2015, Debré left her husband, started dating women, and gave up her sparkly career as a lawyer to write. She has written four other novels, including Play Boy (2018) and Nom (2022). This memoir follows—movingly and with punky defiance—her attempts to see Paul, mixing an ascetic prose with a profound, steely honesty. It explores her efforts to build and maintain unapologetically new rituals for living—while at the same time wishing for love in that new life.
Debré meets Laurent at Café de Flore in Paris. They’ve been separated for three years, and have alternated weeks for looking after Paul without problems. Debré has started dating women and is meeting with Laurent to tell him that. “Fucking girls would be more accurate.” Laurent seems to take it fine. Time passes. Suddenly, Paul does not want to see Debré. She gives him space. More time passes; they don’t see each other. Unsure how to see him again, Debré files a claim with the court to determine the custody arrangement for Paul. Laurent responds by filing submissions seeking sole custody, accusing Debré of incest and paedophilia; the submissions are absurd, featuring Laurent’s lawyer reading passages from Hervé Guibert’s Crazy for Vincent purportedly as evidence of Debré’s unsuitability as a parent. The judge appoints a psychiatrist to examine Paul, Laurent, and Debré. In the meantime, Laurent has sole custody. It is in that interminable legal waiting space that the memoir takes place.
Debré has few attachments: she floats from apartment to apartment; she wears the same uniform of jeans or canvas pants, black or white tees; she smokes Marlboro lights in the evening and swims during the day. “My work consists of waiting, swimming, and fucking girls,” she says. Her writing too is skeletal and sharp, its rhythm as if forced from a clenched jaw. Sentences are short, clipped with limited descriptions and explanations. Here, for example, is Debré writing about her daily routine: “Every day I go to Starbucks to write, I sit around in cafes, and I walk. I take my swimming bag, my cigarettes, a book, and just walk. No direction in particular. I prefer places that aren’t too beautiful, I can’t bear beauty anymore.”
Clauses are interrupted with full stops and conclusions are stated baldly without obfuscation or further justification. The mix of precision and stark declaratory statements lends an air of decisiveness and confidence to the writing—helping to build a sense of a person who is sure about what she wants, but unsure about whether the world can give it to her.
Much of the memoir is spent waiting: for psychiatric reports, for judges, for Paul, or for Laurent to allow her to see him. During this time Debré if forced to sit with the experience of seeing her openness—an openness she has offered about who she is and who she wants to fuck—being twisted, used to characterise her as a threat; to transform her into a predator, a source of violence. Debré doesn’t linger on this; she sticks to her routine, swimming every day as her “own form of madness to keep the madness at bay.” Every therapist tells you to go for a run, but there’s something particularly meditative about swimming. There are no distractions. There is a black line to look at, surrounded by identical tiles. You count your stroke. You count your breath. Then you meet a wall and turn and count your stroke again. It is, as Debré writes about her clothes, like “a style inspired by emptiness”.
Debré’s desire for “as little as possible” is not simply a therapeutic balm to the uncertainty in her life or a rejection of the pomp and conservatism of her previous lawyering. It is also, proudly, how she wants to live—whether in her romantic, financial, or aesthetic attachments. “A life of convenience, a full fridge,” she writes bluntly, “the thought makes me want to die.” She describes being gay as “a long vacation, expansive as the sea with nothing on the horizon, nothing to close it, nothing to define it.” Debré wants freedom and itches for a life that gives it to her. “[H]omosexuality just meant taking a break from everything,” she writes—where everything includes cloying obligations, lovers asking for too much, a long term lease, a cumbersome wardrobe and “the absurdity that comes with being a woman, the obscenity that comes with being a mother.”
Debré dates casually, describing the women she dates with numbers (“number one”) or characteristics (“the young one”) such that they come and go without the reader paying much attention to them as people. Then there’s G, who she sees casually but exclusively. (Debré says that the upside of monogamy is “the simplicity” but it increases the risk “of breaking your teeth, the few you have left, all in one go”). Ultimately, however, their relationship suffers, as G wants more intimacy and reliability and Debré is in no position to offer it. Many of us have felt, I think, our desire for others limited to the fleeting, the ephemeral, the contained. In part that can stem, as it does in Debré’s case, from wanting a life that isn’t simply a reproduction of the heterosexual dynamics that we’ve rejected (“I’ve already done the whole mom and dad thing. Mom and mom is just as much of a drag.”) It comes from wanting more: “I thought,” she writes, “dykes would be as cool as fags, always inventing new things.”
Yet in the midst of seeking out that invention, the truth rendered so wonderfully in Love Me Tender is that we still, despite any pushing away, or retreating, or clear articulation of Boundaries—we still, ultimately, tenderly, want love. The tragedy crushed into this memoir is that Debré wants both: she wants a simple gay ascetic life of swimming and cigarettes and chance encounters, and she wants to be loved—by Paul and by the people she dates—all the same.
On the cover of the French edition published by Flammarion, beneath the title, they have added with speech marks “Puisque rien ne m’oblige”—which translates roughly to: “Since nothing compels me.” If you read the title and the quote as one sentence, it unlocks, I think, a hum underpinning this memoir. Since nothing compels me, love me tender. Debré isn’t returning to a life entangled by obligation, compressed and compressed and compressed by her duties until there’s nothing left. Nothing compels me, she says defiantly. Yet what tugs at you, reading the memoir—what keeps you reading and reading—is what follows. Since nothing compels me, please, Debré asks (or perhaps, more likely, demands): love me tender.
Thea McLachlan is a writer from Aotearoa who lives in London. She can be contacted at thea.f.mclachlan@gmail.com or on instagram @theafraser__ You can read more of her writing on her substack: iloveemails.substack.com.