Edit: a reader corrected my presumption that Dustan died of AIDS-related complications, he passed of an accidental drug overdose
Sometimes, I think I could change this Substack’s byline to include “Constance Debré fan girl”. I picked up the collected works of Guillaume Dustan because an interviewer insisted that Debré sounded a lot like Dustan, and Debré reluctantly admitted that was likely true as she had read his works as she was writing her own. I read Dustan’s In My Room (1996) the night before last. It mostly takes place in Dustan’s bedroom. The literalness of the title is telling. Both Dustan and Debré wrote/write autofiction, and there are strong similarities in their anxious yet deadpan stream-of-consciousness prose styling. Both were/are in Paris, and show their reader the seedier, gritty parts of the culture that aren’t typically shown to us might-be tourists. The two writers rely on shock value (shock and grit are more common in French literature than American, eg., Louis-Fe…