Love me tender / Constance Debré ; translated by Holly James.

In Love Me Tender, Debre 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, Debre 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, Debre'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, Debre speaks courageously of love in its many forms, reframing what it means to be a mother beyond conventional expectations.

"When the narrator of Love Me Tender told her ex-husband that she was dating women, he made a string of unfounded accusations that separated her from her young son. Paul was trained to say he no longer wanted to see his mother, and the judge believed him. Invigorated by her newfound freedom, the narrator approaches life with passionate intensity. She has her cigarettes, the pool where she swims daily and two regular lovers in addition to the women she encounters in the street, at the bar, at readings of her work. Her routine is monastic and military. She is filled with desire for an unencumbered existence, certain that no love can last. And yet, she cannot entirely forget about Paul. A starkly beautiful account of the impossible sacrifices asked from mothers, Love Me Tender is a bold novel of defiance, freedom and self-knowledge."--Provided by publisher.

London : Tuskar Rock Press, 2023.

165 pages ; 20 cm

Paperback edition.

Original French edition published in France in 2020 by Flammarion, Paris.

First published in the USA in 2022 by Semiotext(e), Los Angeles.

In English, translated from the original French.