In playboy and in love me Tender (Stock, 2018 and Flammarion, 2020), this lawyer, married and mother of a little boy, told how she had left everything to write and live her homosexuality without compromise. After getting rid of almost everything (“Family, marriage, work, apartments, things, beings.”), Constance Debré continues her radicalization.
With name, which slams like an immense refusal, she takes advantage of the death of her father to liquidate a cumbersome family inheritance, in spite of the ministers, the academicians or the counts: “Every family creates its madness and feeds it since it only holds together by she. »
On the cover, his intransigence stands out in his panoply of a soldier on leave. Shaved hair, leather jacket, jeans, t-shirt. At fifty, it is the result of the discipline that she imposes on herself and does not hesitate to tell: gymnastics, swimming pool sessions, flirting. She tells us with a mixture of astonishment and pride (and a good dose of narcissism): “Today I have a body. »
She recounts the last days of her father’s life, while remembering episodes from her childhood, stuck between a journalist father and a mother “born in a castle”, two bourgeois junkies, followers of the opium. The present, he expresses himself between a sex story and a thought for his twelve-year-old son, not seen for four years. “These are things that happen when you change your life,” she writes.
For Constance Debré, the family no longer exists. It is only a belief, like Marxism, capitalism or psychoanalysis. We can decide to stop believing in it. Which she does by deconstructing her own family history, before setting it on fire.
And also (even if his whole book nevertheless tells us the opposite): “The events of childhood have no relation to childhood. A sentence, it’s possible, that a psychoanalyst will perhaps find difficult to make his son understand in a few years.
With short sentences, never stingy with paradoxes, rejecting her bourgeois origins – which made her and fueled her revolt – Constance Debré explains that she makes books “against lamentable life”.