Some names are more difficult to bear than others. When his paternal grandfather (Michel Debré) was prime minister; that his surname was used to baptize public places in Paris; or that this legacy becomes a daily burden in the face of the decline of his parents. “In a society that is finally modern, family names would disappear”, writes Constance Debré in name.
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On the death of his father, the journalist François Debré, the author of Love Me Tender seeks to clear the air to finally be free of this name, to relieve herself of this burden which she does not want and in which she does not believe, in the hope of finally putting an end to her origins.
In this jerky, telegraphic style that suits the story so well, she goes back as far as her memory allows, to these fleeting images of her past – her father in the background, always gone on assignments to the four corners of the world. or absent in his own living room, “to give a damn” and smoke opium with his mother, when they weren’t arguing.
Then when that bourgeois drug, as she calls it, gives way to heroin and drugs, and booze when there’s no money left to pay the rent because her father will end up lose her job, she and her sister will live with their grandparents, in temporary apartments or in a hotel.
Between past and present, Constance Debré recounts her contempt for her father’s bourgeoisie and her mother’s aristocracy, her summers in the Basque castle of her maternal family – “a small collection of young deaths and violent deaths”, victims of drugs, drugs and alcohol, like her mother, by the way, whom she will lose at 16.
Despite everything, Constance Debré will have managed to hold on until her 40th birthday in all her “small bourgeois successes”; she will be a lawyer, wife and mother before dropping everything to write books.
name is a page that turns in her family history, the end of a chapter to which we attend with a certain admiration for the one who had the courage to live as she sees fit. And if it leaves us unsatisfied, it’s because we close the book with the impression that it marks a turning point, while paving the way for future novels that we will be waiting for impatiently.
name
Constance Debre
flammarion
176 pages