Description

‘Destined to become a classic of its kind’ Maggie Nelson

‘One of the most compulsive voices I’ve read in years’ Olivia Laing, Observer

When Constance told her ex-husband that she was dating women, he made a string of unfounded accusations that separated her from her young son, Paul. Laurent trained Paul to say he no longer wants to see his mother, and the judge believed him.

She approaches this new life with passionate intensity and the desire for an unencumbered existence, certain that no love can last. Apart from cigarettes, two regular lovers and women she has brief affairs with, Constance’s approach is monastic and military – she swims daily, reads, writes, and returns to small or borrowed rooms for the night.

A starkly beautiful account of impossible sacrifices asked from mothers, Love Me Tender is a bold novel of defiance, freedom and self-knowledge.

Publisher Review

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 A deadpan, tensile thread of a voice: calm, Camusian, comic, stark, relentless, and totally hypnotic. -- Rachel Kushner Exhilarating -- Eileen Myles, author of Afterglow In cruel, brilliant sentences that tighten around the truth like teeth, a fierce character emerges; a new kind of rebel in a queer masterpiece. -- Holly Pester, author of Comic Timing Love Me Tender is a spitting, snarling tour de force of fuck-you feminist defiance. Pulling us straight from the tender moments of a mother meeting her estranged child, right into a whirlwind of lesbian pick-ups, Parisian apartment-hopping and chain smoking, Debre's novel is a stark reminder of society's suspicion towards women - particularly mothers -who resist easy definition. Wry, bold and confronting, Love Me Tender insists on a woman's right to define herself, to choose her own life. -- Imogen Crimp, author of A Very Nice Girl Love Me Tender is written with edge and urgency in a voice that is both vulnerable and in full command. I read it in one sitting and was taken over by its narrative energy and shocked by the story it tells. -- Colm Toibin 'Intense... a character striving mightily for authenticity and honesty, questioning and rending the veil of social norms, acknowledging the Absurd, in hopes of finding some more solid, albeit subjective, truth' -- Claire Messud, author of The Burning Girl * Harper's * I am obsessed with Debre's spare account of a, both chosen and necessarily, pared-down life, that smashes the conventions of style as it smashes the conventions of family, without ever losing its tender touch. -- Joanna Walsh, author of Break.up Love Me Tender will break your heart and repair it and break it again, but not because it's trying to. Debre writes matter of factly, fluidly, scabrously, laying bare the hypocrisies of society, of institutions, of families. It is a brutal manifesto of how to live an honest life, direct the way a laser is direct. -- Lauren Elkin, author of Flaneuse This book knocked my block off. One of a kind -- Ana Kinsella, author of Look Here A compulsive read, this is for fans of Virginie Despentes, Herve Guibert and Guillaume Dustan. * AnOther magazine best books feature *