Love Me Tender, by Constance Debré

More than a coming out memoir/novel...

Constance Debre’s ‘Love Me Tender’ is a spirit novel-memoir of mine. I cannot tell you if it’s “good” or not, but I loved it because it feels so deeply personal to me. I finished it quickly and almost wanted to start reading it over again. 

Debre’s writing is a stream of consciousness, long run-on sentences that at once both highly refined and coolly controlled, while seeming emotional and disordered. There’s a lot in her writing that reminds me of Eva Baltasar’s, but you could never confuse the two. Debre’s writing has a more spartan, controlled quality that I loved. Perhaps it’s the lawyer in her. 

Most descriptions of Constance’s story are simplified as “lady lawyer gets divorced, quits practicing law, comes out as a lesbian, and has lots of sex”. All of this is true, but much of ‘Love Me Tender’ is about the relationship between Debre and her son. “I don’t see why the love between a mother and son should be different from other kinds of love. Why we shouldn’t be allowed to stop lovi…