Description

‘Defiant, probing, hot’ Saba Sams, author of Send Nudes

At the age of forty-three, the narrator abandons her marriage, her apartment and her successful legal career as a public defender to re-emerge as an out lesbian and a writer.

In a series of short, sharp vignettes, the narrator describes her first female lovers – a married woman fifteen years older than her, a model ten years her junior – punctuated by encounters with her ex-husband, her father and her son.

Looking at the world through fresh eyes, she questions everything that once lay beneath the surface of her well-managed life. Unburdened by marital and familial obligations, a new woman emerges, free to examine gender and marriage, selfishness and sacrifice, money and family, even the privilege inherent in her downward mobility.

A compelling chronicle of transgression, Playboy is Constance Debre’s unflinching account of new bachelorhood. Laconic, aggressive and radically truthful, she chronicles the process that made her one of the most important French writers today.

Translated by Holly James

Publisher Review

Debre’s voice is like a diamond drill boring through stone … that cold sliver of voice, conducting electricity at a high voltage, sending the occasional shower of sparks off the page * Bookforum * Playboy is an unparalleled document of desire that flies in the face of societal expectations. Debre’s narrator pursues her own with a restless curiosity, all the more intense for its ambivalence, and calm coexistence with the emotional shrapnel left in its wake. This crushing bluntness is at once wounding, unmooring and transcendent; I can’t get it out of my head — Daisy Lafarge, author of Paul Playboy is a book that explodes what it means to be a woman in lust with another woman in a heteronormative world. An essential read — Joelle Taylor, T.S. Eliot Prize-winning author of C+nto This was my first Debre and will certainly not be my last. Playboy has no interest in the comfort of its readers. It is defiant, probing, hot, occasionally cruel, and never, ever sorry — Saba Sams, author of Send Nudes Playboy is written in sharp, searing, and tender vignettes, peppered with desire, banality, and skewering takes on heteronormativity. Debre looks the reader right in the eye, and doesn’t blink. It’s a book that makes other books possible — Jenna Clake, author of Disturbance Constance Debre has the power to make you gasp like no other writer – it’s a thrill to be back with her taught-af prose rendered brilliantly into English by Holly James’s translation. Playboy is a razor sharp exposition of desire and the rocky paths we follow as we try to sate ourselves. As ever, too, Debre dispenses swiftly with bourgeois heterosexual moral codes, exposing the hypocrisies at the heart of French society — Rebecca May Johnson, author of Small Fires Playboy is a classic of the queer canon, exploring untilled ideas of bourgeois relationship to class, to body, and to sexuality. Debre’s narrator is detached, distanced and at times brutal, approaching attraction with a lingering sense of ennui rising to hostility. The protagonist wrestles with the idea of the masculine female, and navigates internalised misogyny in a journey that leads back to the self. In writing that is as economic and incisive as it is sensuous and poetic, Playboy is a book that explodes what it means to be a woman in lust with another woman in a heteronormative world. An essential read. — Joelle Taylor, author of The Night Alphabet Praise for Constance Debre — : Tight, present-tense prose … genuinely inspiring * Financial Times * A deadpan, tensile thread of a voice: calm, Camusian, comic, stark, relentless, and totally hypnotic — Rachel Kushner Debre writes matter of factly, fluidly, scabrously, laying bare the hypocrisies of society, of institutions, of families … direct the way a laser is direct — Lauren Elkin Committed to truth-telling, no matter how rough, but also intriguingly suspended in a cloud of unknowing and pain, Love Me Tender is a wry, original, agonizing book destined to become a classic of its kind — Maggie Nelson