Playboy: 'An essential read' - Joelle Taylor, T.S. Eliot Prize-winning author of C+nto

(Paperback, Main)

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At the age of forty-three, the narrator abandons her marriage, her apartment and her successful legal career as a public defender to re-emerge as an out lesbian and a writer.

In a series of short, sharp vignettes, the narrator describes her first female lovers - a married woman fifteen years older than her, a model ten years her junior - punctuated by encounters with her ex-husband, her father and her son.

Looking at the world through fresh eyes, she questions everything that once lay beneath the surface of her well-managed life. Unburdened by marital and familial obligations, a new woman emerges, free to examine gender and marriage, selfishness and sacrifice, money and family, even the privilege inherent in her downward mobility.

A compelling chronicle of transgression, Playboy is Constance Debre's unflinching account of new bachelorhood. Laconic, aggressive and radically truthful, she chronicles the process that made her one of the most important French writers today.

Translated by Holly James

Reviews

'Playboy is an unparalleled document of desire that flies in the face of societal expectations. Debre's narrator pursues her own with a restless curiosity, all the more intense for its ambivalence, and calm coexistence with the emotional shrapnel left in its wake. This crushing bluntness is at once wounding, unmooring and transcendent; I can't get it out of my head' - Daisy Lafarge, author of Paul

'Playboy is a book that explodes what it means to be a woman in lust with another woman in a heteronormative world. An essential read' - Joelle Taylor, T.S. Eliot Prize-winning author of C+nto

'This was my first Debre and will certainly not be my last. Playboy has no interest in the comfort of its readers. It is defiant, probing, hot, occasionally cruel, and never, ever sorry' - Saba Sams, author of Send Nudes

'Playboy is written in sharp, searing, and tender vignettes, peppered with desire, banality, and skewering takes on heteronormativity. Debre looks the reader right in the eye, and doesn't blink. It's a book that makes other books possible' - Jenna Clake, author of Disturbance

'Constance Debre has the power to make you gasp like no other writer - it's a thrill to be back with her taught-af prose rendered brilliantly into English by Holly James's translation. Playboy is a razor sharp exposition of desire and the rocky paths we follow as we try to sate ourselves. As ever, too, Debre dispenses swiftly with bourgeois heterosexual moral codes, exposing the hypocrisies at the heart of French society' - Rebecca May Johnson, author of Small Fires

Author Bio

Constance Debre is the author of Love Me Tender, which won the Prix Litteraire des Inrockuptibles in 2020 and Playboy, which won the Prix de la Coupole in 2018. Nom, the final title in this autofiction trilogy, is forthcoming from Serpent's Tail and will be translated by Lauren Elkin.

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