“There’s always a price to pay for freedom,” says Constance Debré, running a hand over her shaved head and her neck tattoo that reads “plutôt crêver” (“rather die”), in the in-depth interview below with The Guardian.
The 50-year-old author, who faced a fierce custody battle over her young son after coming out as gay in her mid 40s, adds: “To me, that’s a happier, livelier way to see things: rather than saying there are injustices or blows raining down on you, you realise it’s all because you’re living life in the way you want, seeking out an existence … trying to give life some shape. That’s why life and literature are so connected: it’s the quest for form.”
Debré tore up the rule book of French writing with a bestselling trilogy based on the dramatic turn her life took after she came out. The darkly comic, first-person account of a separated mother’s Don Juan-style conquests of women is interwoven with scenes of her “taking an automatic rifle” to her bourgeois life as a criminal defence barrister from a famous French political dynasty. More than a coming-out saga, Debré likens it to a Saint Augustine-style conversion, a total transformation.
The protagonist and narrator, who is not named, is clearly Debré herself, following in a long French tradition of creative writers who draw closely on real-life events – the most notable being last year’s Nobel laureate Annie Ernaux. Yet though the events are real, Debré firmly considers her work fiction rather than autobiography or memoir, because it relies on the literary art of constructing a narrative, creating a relationship between a character and events. “What makes a novel is its form,” she says.
Just as Debré did, the narrator leaves the smart neighbourhoods of Paris where she grew up, abandons her job and possessions, and lives nomadically while reflecting on the arc of her life – from the opium and heroin addictions of her aristocratic parents, and her mother’s sudden death when Debré was 16, to her work in court defending drug dealers, murderers, rapists. The first book of the trilogy, Play Boy, won the Prix de la Coupole in 2018, and since then, every Debré publication has been a major literary event.
Love Me Tender, the second novel, is so raw and fast‑paced that it stands alone. It is Debré’s first book to be published in the UK, in a translation by Holly James, and draws on her estranged husband’s attempts to stop her seeing her young son, arguing in court that her new life as a lesbian and a provocative writer made her unsuitable as a mother. The court eventually finds in her favour, but not before years tick by in which she is allowed only sporadic supervised visits with her son at a family contact centre. The battle against the family court system reads like a thriller, a race against time to stop the mother‑child relationship fading out.
There is an absurdity at the heart of all this – that Debré had to pay such a price for coming out as a lesbian in well-heeled Paris. When she “switched” to female partners it was a few years after same-sex marriages were legalised in France. “We all think we live in an extremely free society,” she says. “But the events in this book show that when someones changes category, it’s not always easy.”
We meet in Belleville, northern Paris. In Love Me Tender, Debré describes her protagonist’s imposing presence – tall frame, leather jacket, tattoos, icy stare – as a cross between Marcel Proust’s Baron de Charlus and the Sex Pistols’ Sid Vicious. She is extremely polite, and hates the fact that she has never been able to shake that part of her upbringing. She’s just back from a writer’s residency in Los Angeles and says she has fallen in love with the city. “There’s a melancholy in LA which isn’t at all the same as the melancholy of Paris. Paris melancholy is sad and dark. In LA, the melancholy has a kind of softness.”
For Debré, style is what counts. Hailed by French critics for her slap-in-the-face narration, she strips the French language back to its most crude and colloquial, subverts punctuation and deliberately goes against the current trend in French writing for plunging into psychological explanation.
“I wanted a style that would be the least verbose, very direct, fat-free, efficient – with as little psychology as possible because I absolutely detest that. I had in mind that well-known photograph by William Eggleston, a naked bulb on a ceiling – just a bulb and three white cables in a red room. It’s banal and it has an incredible strength. I wanted to get back to that concept, which we’ve had in music, art, photography for 50 years. You find it less in literature, at least in French writing, which is deliberately delicate. I wanted to grab events and grab the reader.”
She is relieved that English-language readers might come to her unencumbered by the baggage of her famous surname – the final novel of her trilogy, Nom (Name), is about the need to escape that legacy. She was born into a French political dynasty labelled the “French Kennedys”.
Her grandfather, Michel Debré, was Charles de Gaulle’s prime minister and wrote the modern French constitution. Her great-grandfather, Robert Debré, is seen as the founder of modern pediatrics and has a Paris hospital named after him. Her uncles were ministers. Her father, François Debré, was an award-winning war reporter who returned from his assignments in Asia with an opium habit. Her mother, a fashion model, came from an eccentric aristocratic family which had fallen on hard times, but whose women were tough, liked hunting and driving fast. She gave Debré her first rifle at 15.