Playboy: Constance Debré

A book I'll read again, and probably again after that.

“I thought to myself Junkie, Jew, or dyke, it’s all the same, they’re just different words for the same thing. When you’re like Robert or my father or me, you just have to choose one of the three and stick with it, the reality it represents is irrelevant. Deep down, being gay means nothing to me….There’s no substance to any of it. Nothing of importance. Nothing essential….we’re all doing really badly. That’s how it is, that’s how we were born. So we’re forced to try things to try and get better….Sometimes it works for a while. Sometimes it doesn’t. Either way you have to do something with the longing, the absence.”

I sometimes wonder about that inner emptiness. It’s not something I’ve felt, I care too deeply about everything, in a way that more light-hearted folks must find exhausting. The above quote is from Constance Debré’s ‘Playboy’, and Debré’ would never claim to care too much or deeply as I would.  She makes herself out to be nihilistic, and the world to be futile. She often speaks of being bored. Her boredom, Debré tells us, is that of the very rich - Debré is the now-monetarily-not rich, “temporarily disgraced millionaire” descendent of a prime minister and political family one side, and aristocrats on the other. She recognizes that she has the sort of confidence and security that comes with being upper class, that she can slum it and her parents were heroin addicts, because the messes can be cleaned up. She has the option to leave it behind in a way that people outside of her class do not (eg, you know, getting a publishing deal as a brand new author because of her famous last name). The book itself is a series of run-on sentences and short, sharp little chapters about her leaving her husband and child, becoming fascinated and repulsed by the mother of one her clients, and discarding her comfortable life as a wife, mother, and lawyer for the unknown. She looks down on her petit bourgeois lover and can’t stop doing so even when she tries. She recognizes why people from other classes hates her own. That awareness of self and the world makes for great writing. In this book, Debré’s first, she tells the story of coming out in two senses. In an interview for Granta, she said “In the same week, I had sex with a girl and I had the feeling that I could write.” The sex and relationship with that first woman were not fulfilling, but they were there, an upending of her unhappiness with coupledom, family life, and the futility of a career in and of the legal system itself, in which outcomes were easily predicted and based on class and gender rather than facts of any particular case. 

As I read that quote above, which appears near the end, I asked if being gay truly meant so little, why would Debré write multiple books about it? Why would she go through such lengths to alter her appearance to a more comfortably (for her) masculine appearance? Why would she seek out women with such fear at first, then more joyfully and aggressively, telling us that she never knew she could feel so much desire if all of this matters so little?

Debré gives you the impression that things don’t matter because she, and we are all, alone. If you read through the lines, she’s seldom physically alone, but she feels deattached from the people around her. She has her ex-husband, her son, frequently visits her father, rarely mentions her sister, has friends that are quickly, casually mentioned. There’s something in this aggressive individualism that reminds me of two other French writers: Jean Genet and Albert Camus (French-Algerian). There’s something in the disaffectedness loneliness of the upper classes that reminds me of Bret Easton Ellis (minus, of course, his violent sensationalism). Of lesbian writers, the closest would be Eva Baltasar, in both voice and the idea of being alone even when you are surrounded by others and in that thing that society tells us prevents loneliness: a romantic, sexual relationship. Yet, Debré seldom spends even a single night alone as she’s never without a lover. The second woman Debré dates - the back of the book says she’s ten years younger, but in the book, she is fifteen years younger and the daughter of a family friend - introduces her to desire and passionate sex, and becomes the reason that Debré asks her husband for a divorce. Not that Debré thinks the relationship will last: she’s aware throughout that the strength of the love and wanting she feels for the woman are not forever, no matter that the younger woman argues for forever. Debré in particular presents herself as a gleefully aggressive person: pursuing women, understanding that her role is to make the first move, often abruptly breaking things off with the women she dates. Debré says she is selfish. At the end of ‘Love Me Tender’, she posits a theory of the reasons behind her selfishness and loneliness: grief. So then, is she really selfish, and is individualistic, empty loneliness intrinsic to the human condition as she posits in this book?

It’s impossible to say. With wealth or the perception of it comes a lack of reliance on others, and without the ties of dependency, one might feel selfish and empty. Debré perception of privilege also negates the need for sweeping societal change, whereas my perception of my lack of privilege gives me the sense that it is an urgent necessity and there is a collective “we” that must work toward that. It’s impossible to say which is correct; Debré’s views on her selfishness and privilege are skewed (as are my own that change is possible) and the truth is nebulous.

Yes, this is an oddly personal book review. Like ‘Love Me Tender’, I loved this book and it feels too deeply personal for me to write an objective review that is removed from my thoughts and feelings about it. After I finished it, I wanted to start reading it all over again, to memorize passages of it both by heart and to carry both of the books in the pocket of the man’s jacket I often wear (the pocket I carried ‘Love Me Tender’ home in after I bought it). Part of it is that particulars of Debré’s experience match my own (the legal career I don’t want, the rejection of middle class heteronormative normalcy). Part of it is that her views seem to differ wildly from mine and yet I feel as they’re actually quite similar.