Love Me Tender

(Paperback, Main)

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'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.

Reviews

'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

'Love Me Tender will break your heart and repair it and break it again, but not because it's trying to. Debr 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 Flneuse

'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

Author Bio

Constance Debr has written two other novels, Play Boy, which won the Prix de la Coupole in 2018, and Nom. Love Me Tender won the Prix Littraire des Inrockuptibles in 2020.

Holly James is a translator, writer and editor. Her translations have been published by Europa Editions and Semiotext(e).