Overview

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.

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9781800814837

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Love Me Tender is a book unlike any other. It's a page-turner that tumbles forth like a horror story, albeit one punctuated by sex, swimming, injustice, and love. 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 What remains when a person shears away-like sacrificing her gorgeous locks-the family, the 'good breeding,' the 'brilliant career' and every pleasing role she was meant to play? In the case of Constance Debre, what remains is a deadpan, tensile thread of a voice: calm, Camusian, comic, stark, relentless, and totally hypnotic. -- Rachel Kushner Exhilarating -- Eileen Myles, author of Afterglow 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 <i>Comic Timing</i>

Love Me Tender is a book unlike any other. It's a page-turner that tumbles forth like a horror story, albeit one punctuated by sex, swimming, injustice, and love. 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 What remains when a person shears away-like sacrificing her gorgeous locks-the family, the 'good breeding,' the 'brilliant career' and every pleasing role she was meant to play? In the case of Constance Debre, what remains is a deadpan, tensile thread of a voice: calm, Camusian, comic, stark, relentless, and totally hypnotic. -- Rachel Kushner

Love Me Tender is a book unlike any other. It's a page-turner that tumbles forth like a horror story, albeit one punctuated by sex, swimming, injustice, and love. 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

Author Information

Constance Debre has written two other novels, Play Boy, which won the Prix de la Coupole in 2018, and Nom. Love Me Tender won the Prix Litteraire des Inrockuptibles in 2020. Holly James is a translator, writer and editor. Her translations have been published by Europa Editions and Semiotext(e).

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