Rolex and Ladurée

Early in​ Playboy, the first book in Constance Debré’s trilogy of novels about a woman whose life closely resembles Debré’s own, the narrator describes the feelings of intense boredom she began experiencing at a young age:

I gave everyone the shock of their lives when I was four. My great-grandfather the medical professor they named the hospital after insisted on me having brain scans. The man of progress himself thought the fear of nothingness might show up on an MRI. Obviously they didn’t find anything … People get scared by the slightest thing. I get bored by the slightest thing. That’s the difference between them and me. And I can’t believe my luck.

At around the same age she found she had certain desires. She wanted ‘short hair, boys’ clothes, boys’ toys, a boys’ life … At the age of four I was homosexual. I knew full well and so did my parents. After that it kind of passed. Now it’s coming back. It’s as simple as that.’

She delights in shocking people. It’s partly a class thing: as the child of ‘upper-class junkies’, as someone who is ‘rich without a dime’, she likes to remind us that she isn’t like other French people. She has a ‘snobby accent’, which makes her stand out at the supermarket in a provincial town: ‘Even my shopping cart says I am not from here and I’m not like them.’ She comes from a famous family, as Debré herself does: not only did her great-grandfather have a hospital named after him; her paternal grandfather, Michel Debré, was the first prime minister of France. The narrator’s class seems to confer a perpetual ennui: ‘It might be because we’re all bored shitless, the whole upper class, more bored than others that we speak like this. Just as bored as poor people. Really poor people.’

Perhaps that’s partly why she leaves her husband of twenty years, Laurent, and starts sleeping with women: to shock, to relieve the boredom (‘the essence of couple life is being bored shitless’). Her sexual experiences with women start off fairly coolly, as though she’s performing an experiment. The first woman she has sex with, Agnès, is fifty and married. They meet when the narrator, who works as a lawyer, defends Agnès’s son in court. (‘Of course he got off. Middle-class people never do time.’) Their flirtation begins slowly, in glances and gestures: ‘The moment comes when it’s time to say goodbye to her, when I hold her, when I breathe in her scent. I don’t know if it’s desire. I don’t know what it would be like to kiss her.’ The narrator sees Agnès’s breasts when she takes off her bra to swim in the sea, and is struck by the ‘violence of another person’s body’. They go on for a while in this chaste way, which both frustrates and titillates the narrator. When they travel to Italy together, Agnès texts her to invite her to her room, adding a smile emoji (‘I can’t even begin to describe how much I hate emojis’). Her descriptions of her would-be lover are clinical: ‘She’s lying on her bed. She’s wearing panties and a T-shirt. It’s the upper thighs that show the first signs of age in women.’ The next day, however, she stops ‘thinking’:

Suddenly I want her and I lean in towards her. I kiss her, I slide my hand beneath her T-shirt, I stroke her breasts, I kiss them. Breasts and love. Of course. I understand something I didn’t know before … At five in the morning, the light is still grey. She’s the first thing I see when I wake up. A naked woman lying close to me. She’s on her side. Sleeping. Her back, her shoulders, her ass. I see all her beauty, the beauty of women, I see my own body, new. I tell myself There are lots of things that are possible.

Playboy was published in France in 2018 and immediately caused a stir: it won the prestigious Coupole Prize and was seized on by critics, and the public, as a powerful challenge to conservative views on gender and the proper place for women. Since its first appearance in English translation in 2022, Debré’s writing has been received similarly in the British and American press.

But it isn’t clear that the novels are anything like as transgressive as their provocations may make them seem. Debré’s narrator doesn’t reflect much on her gender. If she were younger (like Debré, she comes out later in life, in her mid-forties), or living elsewhere, she might have explored the possibilities afforded by a non-binary identity. Instead she takes on the role traditionally accorded to a straight man: ‘The pleasure of being the one who leans in’. The heterosexual dynamic with Agnès creates problems, however. ‘She tries to touch me. She’s clumsy. She gets upset, as if I am a man and I can’t get it up.’ The comparisons between her body and her lover’s turn quite quickly into an old-fashioned form of misogyny:

So that’s what a woman is, soft skin and stupidity, a narrow soul that can’t compare with the softness of the skin, sloppy caresses, a body that can’t return the reverence it inspires, an animal that knows nothing of love and desire, that knows nothing of beauty either, a bourgeois body, devoid of greatness, slightly dirty. It’s someone who cries when they’re being mean. To love a woman is to despise her. I understood the violence of men.

How knowing is this voice? Occasionally Debré’s narrator seems to gesture towards irony, but most of the time she takes herself – and statements such as this – all too seriously. Her way of inhabiting masculinity precludes any affection towards women. She gets a haircut as part of her coming out, but manages to make it less than transgressive. The old binaries remain: ‘Like a boy, yes. Or a girl with short hair.’ She also gets a tattoo from a ‘dyke’: ‘When I left with the ink covering my arm down to my hand, my body was heavier.’

Shortly afterwards, she meets another woman: Albertine, or Albert. She’s fifteen years younger than the narrator, who knew her as a child; Albert’s father was one of her father’s addict friends. Desire kicks in, but again through the male gaze: ‘A woman’s body is made to be touched and tasted, a woman is made to be fucked. Breasts are made for hands to feel, an ass is made to be pressed up against, a cunt is made for a face to go down on … No man can compete with that. I understand people who go to whores.’ There is an immaturity to this liaison, both in its headiness – ‘I didn’t know sex could be this good’ – and the refusal to be open, with one another or the world. The narrator and Albert might feel vulnerable but ‘we don’t show it of course, that would be gay.’ A few pages later: ‘One day she asked me What class do we belong to? I said We’re the relegated upper class. Double or quits, darling. I’m not gay. Me too, me neither. Bite my breasts. Not homo, but sexual.’

The narrator’s father disapproves of their relationship, which seems to increase her enjoyment (the shock factor again). She imagines coming out in front of the rest of her family, including her grandfather and his maid, Ludivine (‘she was even Black … how chic, a Black servant for white people’). ‘Do I have your attention? Is everyone listening? I eat girls’ cunts out and suck their nipples and I slip my fingers up their cute little asses because Grandpa, Granny, aunts and uncles, Ludivine dearest, I am a dyke.’ It is one of the few occasions in Debré’s books where race comes up. The narrator may be transgressive within the bounds of her upbringing, but she isn’t interested in thinking beyond that – nor is she forced to.

Laurent doesn’t like seeing her with Albert, while Albert wants her to get a divorce – she is still officially married. She tries to finish the job of dispensing with her old life: throwing out the skirts and dresses she used to wear to please Laurent. She had tried to dress like a ‘whore’, she says, after he had an affair with his intern. But the teenage obsession with Albert can’t last. The relationship fizzles: ‘I got my Rolex back. I gave her back her cross.’ She returns to Agnès, ‘the provincial little woman’. Laurent stops allowing her to see her son, Paul: ‘He says I’m not right in the head. He says I need help. He says I’m dangerous. He hints at things, paedophilia, violence, I don’t know, he never finishes his sentences.’ She files for divorce, gets her ear pierced. Then she dumps Agnès, and finds a new partner through Instagram, but that isn’t enough: ‘It’s going OK but I am getting a little bored. The problem is that even with girls, it’s all become banal.’

Love Me Tender, Debré’s second book (but the first translated into English), picks up the narrative. The narrator is now 47. She has been separated from Laurent for three years, and is still not allowed to see Paul, who is now eight. She has left her job as a lawyer and become a writer; she survives by bumming €100 notes off her rich friends and rummaging in bins for discarded Ladurée macarons. The courts have turned on her: a judge rules that Laurent will have sole custody of their son. The ruling seems more reminiscent of the 19th century than the 21st: the judge disapproves of her tattoos and ‘wants to know why I speak to my son about my homosexuality’. This experience is taken from life. In 2015, after Debré left her husband, quit her job as a criminal barrister and began sleeping with women, a judge denied her custody of her son. The case caused a scandal in the French media because of Debré’s family connections. ‘The judges couldn’t believe I’d given up my respectable life as a lawyer,’ Debré said in an interview last year. ‘France is so retarded.’

In the novel, the narrator responds to the ruling with bravado: ‘First there was Socrates, then Jesus, then Oscar Wilde, and now me. We’re a select few … No great life is complete without a trial, you have to ruffle a few feathers, you can’t just be a good little child all your life.’ She decides to become a ‘lonesome cowboy’. Sex is the answer, the way to fill the void left by her son. This time, the lovers aren’t given names, but numbers (‘She has the same name as one of the previous girls, which is a shame for the list’). Number one and number two, the young one and the skinny one. The only thing that unites them is that they both insist they are straight: ‘She says she’s not a lesbian, but with me it’s different.’ The narrator shuttles between seeing them and returning to her tiny flat to write. The sex is mediocre, a compulsion rather than a pleasure.

Boredom keeps creeping in. The narrator talks about reaching a plateau: ‘The sex hasn’t changed either, licking, fingering, ass fucking, all very nice and polite, I get what I give, more or less.’ It’s hard to understand, reading this, why Debré was considered risqué by the French legal establishment, a danger to her child, or was compared to Hervé Guibert. Guibert’s Crazy for Vincent, which Debré mentions in Love Me Tender, contains moments of truly transgressive sex: in one instance, Guibert performs oral sex on Vincent, his young lover, while he’s defecating. By contrast, Debré’s descriptions seem anodyne, and a little like anatomical drawings. Her lovers have a deathly quality: ‘It saps your energy, of course, spending years like this, all the corpses you end up dragging along behind you. Was Orlando tired by the end of the book?’

Occasionally something breaks through the bravado. She tells us that she avoids ‘parks, schools, bakeries at half past four in the afternoon’ – anywhere she might encounter children. The grief of being separated from Paul makes her ‘run from children as though they were cluster bombs’. But this is a momentary aside, a blip of vulnerability, as when she reflects on the fact that ‘she was my age when she died, my mother. Maybe that’s why I’ve been in a hurry these past few years.’

Debré’s narrator sees her queerness as a form of personal freedom, an escape from convention and responsibility: ‘For me, homosexuality just means taking a break from everything … a long vacation, expansive as the sea.’ The implication is that you can choose to be gay, just as you can choose to leave your job or get a tattoo. But while she enjoys the sense of being transgressive she remains sexually squeamish when it comes to other people’s desires. The younger of her two lovers ‘likes to talk’ during sex: ‘She likes to say she’s my little wifey, my little bitch, my little whore, my little slut. Stop it, stop it, I say.’

The narrator gets mistaken for a man in the women’s changing room at the swimming pool, an experience that only confirms her sense of superiority: ‘She wasn’t French, probably Filipina, maybe she’d just arrived in Paris, maybe I was the first woman she’d seen who didn’t look the way she’d expect a woman to look … I grew up in a family where the women were manly, where they hunted, drove and smoked … It was all very gender fluid, the nobility on my mother’s side, bourgeoisie on my father’s.’ ‘Gender fluid’ here means an aristocratic disdain for social norms; she has no interest in what else it might mean.

Gradually, she realises that her sexuality is tied up with her son: ‘I might never have become a lesbian if I hadn’t been his mother first, I might never have dared, I might never have understood.’ Strangers think she is younger than she is – the ‘Dorian Gray effect’ – which encourages the sense she has of returning to childhood: ‘I’ve rediscovered the tomboy I was as a child. Long time no see. That’s why it was strange going through all this with Paul by my side. Not because of my sex life. But because part of the new me is about … a time before he was born, establishing a connection to the me that existed before him, a me without him.’ Her new-found masculinity is connected to Paul, and her understanding of it is that of a defiant adolescent. She figures herself as a teenage boy: ‘People who fuck a lot aren’t doing it for fun. I feel like a teenager in front of a PlayStation, giving myself brain damage.’ She moves into the spare room of a friend of a friend. Anonymous women return: those who have attended her readings (like Debré, she has become an infamous author), those she picks up at cafés, a female police officer she eyes up. She sleeps with a ‘real butch, for a change’. The catalogue continues: ‘I go through the list, I update the figures, I sort them all by age, occupation, skin colour, neighbourhood, then put them all back: A metro map of conquests.’

She is eventually granted permission to see Paul, but only with a chaperone, ‘in case I stick my hand down his pants. In case I smack him.’ He tells her about seeing her book in a shop, with her ‘face plastered across the front’, or hearing that she was on television. She brings him gifts, notes his small gestures of affection: ‘He touches my hand, he touches my arm, he leans against my shoulder.’ The court-appointed psychiatrist submits his report on her: ‘Having homosexual relations cannot be considered a sign of mental instability in this day and age. Neither can writing books.’ It may be too late, however. She has decided she is no longer a mother – after all, ‘who would want to be? Apart from people who have failed at everything in life.’ She plans to take Paul to visit her father. Laurent had refused the request, made by Paul, twice. This third time he cancels an hour before they set off.

This sets off the usual reaction: ‘Girls, girls, more girls … the one who drives a motorbike, the one who wears red lipstick … the one who does yoga, the ones who have kids, the ones who have dogs, the ones who have cats.’ As the sex becomes even more frequent, even more monotonous, she gives up trying to describe it: ‘We go back to bed. Sex.’ She tries monogamy, with a woman she refers to as ‘G’, shaves her head and finds another apartment. G gives her a red carabiner – ‘definitely a lesbian thing, she says’ – which she clips to the belt loop of her jeans. She keeps a Polaroid of Paul pinned to the wall. He starts refusing to see her but occasionally answers her texts. Eventually she finds that she has ‘finished grieving for my son’. Another woman, S, is now in her life: ‘It was when I decided to stop thinking about Paul all the time that things started moving forward with her. It’s nice to have someone around who loves me.’

In​ Name, the third novel, Paul, who is now twelve, appears only occasionally: the narrator is more concerned with her parents. The book opens with the death of her father from tongue cancer, then moves back to the period when he was dying. She is sleeping with various women (and one trans man, whom she misgenders). She wants to be nameless, to rid herself of the baggage of her family: ‘What is your name? My name is Nobody, a name is nothing, like family, like childhood, I don’t believe in it, I don’t want it.’ But it doesn’t work like that. Part of the difficulty, though she doesn’t see it this way, is her attachment to her class, her family history: ‘The president of the republic told my grandfather that Constance is a beautiful name.’ (Debré mentions ‘my grandfather the prime minister’ seven times in Name.) Later, she finally names herself – ‘I was me, Constance Debré, proof personified that family is only an illusion’ – though we’re not convinced that it is ‘only an illusion’ for her.

Indeed, the narrator’s preoccupation with class and family (she tells us that in her family there are ‘no factory workers, no farmers, no maids, no schoolteachers, no shopkeepers, no low-level civil servants, and also no convicts, whores, fags, murderers, no strangers, no refugees, no immigrants’) is relentless, and her habitual ways of categorising people don’t change as the novels progress. At one point she remembers a murder case in which a young man killed an older woman: ‘J has a gypsy name, whereas hers is a proper French one, with an old-fashioned first name.’ Moments such as this – she also refers to his ‘gypsy face’ – don’t suggest she has rid herself of her ancestral baggage.

The lack of character development would be easier to excuse (or enjoy) in a more amusing, or satirical, series of novels. Critics have called the books ‘darkly comic’, and pointed to moments of ‘biting wit’, but it’s hard to see them as that, given the narrator’s overpowering ennui. Debré has said that she wants her writing to be ‘very direct, fat-free, efficient’, and the translations by Holly James and Lauren Elkin are faithful to her aim. But the staccato prose, the weird punctuation and Debré’s reliance on endless lists wears you down. The provocation stops being shocking and leads nowhere: ‘I understood the violence of men’; ‘I understand people who go to whores.’

At times the narrator targets sentimentality or political correctness, and if that mode prevailed Debré could be compared to writers such as Ottessa Moshfegh, who take aim at society as well as individual complacency. If the following quote annoys you, for instance, then Debré the provocateur may feel she has done her job. ‘The lockdown is convenient for people like me, we barely notice it, or if we do it amuses us, it means there’s more chances of having a fling. People like me appreciate minor catastrophes because they give the world a philosophical atmosphere.’

But in Name, Debré positions herself as a guide, a role model, not merely out to provoke but driven by what seems to be an authentic belief that she is breaking new ground: ‘The point of my books is to explain what’s happening, it’s not to tell the story of my life, it’s to explain what’s happening and how we should live.’ You can’t tell people how they should live, however, if you don’t acknowledge how you got where you are, that the ‘grandfather the prime minister’ you despise is partly why you can write such autobiographical books, why people want to read them, why there’s any interest in you in the first place. Debré’s books are postures, the self-fashioning of someone for whom sexuality is a signifier, a carabiner you can clip to your jeans. In the closing section of Name, the narrator has a conversation in a café with a 32-year-old Arab man who has spent a third of his life in prison. As she writes at her table, he tells her that he’s disgusted by the fact he is no longer ‘able’ to love, by his insomnia and by ‘having developed a sun allergy … What a stupid allergy for an Arab’. He wants to leave Paris, which has changed since he was a child (‘he says he doesn’t know if it’s him or if it’s Paris’). When confronted by someone who has lost everything – who is dealing with questions of how to live, without the privileges afforded by a famous family name – her swagger disappears. The final lines of the trilogy end with a whimper: ‘He asks me What can be done? I don’t know, what do I know, leave, start over.’