Love Me Tender is as taut as the body its protagonist maintains through daily exercise: “I go swimming every day, I have a muscular back and shoulders.” She continues: “I have short hair that’s brown with a bit of grey at the front, I have part of a Caravaggio tattooed on my left arm and delicate lettering on my stomach that says Son of a Bitch.” After the narrator has itemised her appearance and frugal, almost monastic life – an ascetic existence, apart from compulsive sex with other women – she adds: “I don’t see my son any more; everything’s going well, he’s eight, he’ll be nine, then 10, then 11, his name is Paul, he’s great.”
This autofictional novel covers two tense years in the life of its author, here named as the character CD, who has come out as lesbian, left her 20-year marriage and is fighting her ex-husband for access, “not even joint custody”, but simply access to their child. “Just the right to see him and have him stay, every other weekend and half of school vacations.”
I have rarely read an account that so wincingly exposes the bitterness and manipulations of a marriage gone awry, the power of the state and, in the case of CD, its unrelenting homophobia and misogyny. (It is CD’s viewpoint alone that is rivetingly played out here.) Her ex-husband, Laurent, uses her queerness to make outrageous accusations – such as his claim that “mental instability” evolves from homosexuality – which are routinely accepted by the authorities and prevent her from seeing Paul, who often repeats by rote what his father has instructed him to say. Even when a small portion of time is assigned for mother and child to meet, it is frequently sabotaged by the father. CD’s despair in these moments is eloquent: “It wouldn’t be so bad if I at least had something to hold on to. It’s the not knowing that’s unbearable. It’s the time passing with no cutoff point, it’s the lawyers, the judges, the experts, the association, it’s the nausea, it’s the fatigue.”
Yet the novel – or novella, as it runs to less than 200 pages – is not bleak, or not entirely. CD is at last, in her late 40s, attaining her own identity; and through Constance Debré’s spare, functional prose, in a sinewy translation by Holly James, this is thrilling to witness. The parallel tale to her forced estrangement from her son is one of new beginnings: of living a more authentic life, despite an underlying aching loneliness. This CD attempts to assuage with “Girls, girls, and more girls. I’m upping the dose just to feel the effect.” She is as addicted to sex as she is to swimming or to Marlboro Lights.
As a butch lesbian, CD’s masculinity is a liberating reversal of the traditional male power her ex uses against her. If her hookups threaten to develop into a relationship, CD will abruptly terminate the liaison. “Like a convict counting the days, I check them off, I make lists, I draw up a tally on the wall.” Her braggadocio is infectious. “I’m a lonesome cowboy,” she crows.
CD crisscrosses Paris, moving from one tiny flat to another, dumping her possessions as she dumps her lovers, stripping herself down to the bare essentials, psychologically as well as physically: “My goal is to have as little as possible.” Sometimes she steals food from supermarkets “for the beauty of the gesture”, but she keeps her old Rolex “just for a laugh”. At such junctures, and considering Debré’s privileged background – her family, one of France’s most notable; her former career as an eminent lawyer – it appears, uncomfortably, as if she is play-acting with self-deprivation (compared with, say, Annie Ernaux’s brilliant dissections of her own working-class background and its starkly limited choices).
CD visits her widowed father in the family’s crumbling chateau, both still grieving for her mother, who died when CD was a teenager; these scenes explore the ambivalence of the child-parent relationship. Time passes, and CD learns to accommodate the hunger for her absent son, to trust herself to love once more: “The memories of my life with him are fading. Or perhaps they’re still there, but they don’t knock the wind out of me like they used to.”
Love Me Tender is, without a trace of coyness, a love letter, both to a child and to a queer woman’s own becoming. Elements of the novel recall Qiu Miaojin’s posthumously published, impassioned queer classic Last Words from Montmartre (1996). As for Constance – both the author and her fictional counterpart – you root for her all the way.
• Love Me Tender by Constance Debré, translated by Holly James, is published by Tuskar Rock (£12.99). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
