GLR November-December 2025

Letting Events Happen

T HE IMAGE beckoned: a closely shaved head in profile, double hoop earrings, handwritten neck tattoo above a crisp Oxford collar, typography following the curve of the cra nium: Love Me Tender . It was French writer Constance Debré featured on the cover of her first novel translated into English. While the graphics grabbed me, it was the author’s singular voice and the radical simplicity of her enterprise that kept me reading—and made me want more. Now Debré’s trilogy— Playboy , Love Me Tender , and Name— is available in English translations. With each book hovering near 150 pages, these are swift but immersive reads. Brevity is a signature of Debré’s style. Many chapters are a single paragraph, most a few

tem” is akin to the code followed in Hem ingway’s The Sun Also Rises by protagonist Jake Barnes, who has personal courage, can hold his liquor, and knows how things work. Debré’s system is primarily about keeping life clear for reading and writing, but it ex tends into exercising, not drinking (much), listening to Bach, and “shaving her head every eight days on setting number 2.” The narrator thinks it’s important to be tough and strong. She admires people who drive well. Tattoos, in her view, ought to be bad, “like graffiti on the back of a toilet door.” For the record, she hates emojis. Swimming is the backbone of her system. She got the idea from a gay friend who swims every day. “I told myself,” she writes, “that I would be a different person if I were capable

L ORI O’D EA

PLAYBOY by Constance Debré Translated by Holly James Semiotext(e). 176 pages, $17.95 LOVE ME TENDER by Constance Debré Translated by Holly James Semiotext(e). 168 pages, $17.95 NAME by Constance Debré Translated by Lauren Elkin Semiotext(e). 144 pages, $17.95

of doing that.” She becomes a devoted swimmer. Across the tril ogy, we dive with her into the lanes of municipal pools. When Debré writes about swimming, time slows, and she brings us close to her perception of her body gliding weightlessly through water. We experience her improving, becoming stronger, and in tegrating being a swimmer into her identity. The scent of chlorine seems to cling to the pages. One lover becomes jealous and tries to keep the narrator up late to disrupt her aquatic routine. Another aspect of the system is letting events happen—and by events, the narrator largely means women. Debré is adept at evoking immersion in the body’s sensations to the exclusion of all else. When the narrator is in love, the twoness becomes all consuming until it becomes too much. Then she returns to her system, to swimming, to a kind of erotic self-discipline. Love Me Tender depicts a parade of lovers that the narrator records in a list complete with demographic tags. Debré writes entertainingly about sex, about bodies when desire is present and absent. Some of her best writing is about falling out of love. Even as she traces the passionate start of a love affair, she drops details that make us see the end forming like a storm on the hori zon, details that offend the system—an unpleasant odor, an un seemly gift, or a text with the hated smile emoji. As Debré writes about her transformed present, she also re flects on her childhood and heritage, drawing a portrait of the aristocrat as a young lesbian. Her parents accepted her early de sire to look and play as boys typically do. Her father took her thrifting for army clothes. Her mother confirmed that “it was OK to love girls if you’re a girl.” During summers at her mother’s Basque country château, wearing a beret and es padrilles, the narrator would fall in with the local boys, ride horseback, and “piss standing up like a boy.” After the château burned down, they would go to Touraine, the paternal seat, where her grandmother bred dogs and her grandfather, prime minister under de Gaulle, would extoll the virtues of France. Discrete memories assemble into a picture of bygone wealth: “swans in the moat,” “liveries, gold and blue, the family col

pages. Genre is another economy: in these autofictional novels, author, narrator, and main character are one. Luckily, Debré fas cinates and, like any good protagonist, changes over time. Throughout the trilogy, she develops multiple themes, cutting with control from one to the next. One theme is her life trans formation, a second the disintegration of her aristocratic family, and a third the existence of poverty and crime in France along with wealth and social justice. These themes intertwine, though each book has its areas of concentration. Playboy depicts the metamorphosis of two love affairs. Love Me Tender includes the parade of lovers and the loss of her son through divorce. Name explores deep family history and the death of her father. The narrator is a forty-something Parisian who has radically changed her life. Debré’s bio says she “left her career as a lawyer to become a writer,” but that’s understatement. She also left her husband, her son, heterosexuality, and her bourgeois lifestyle. She doesn’t write much about married life, but in glimpses we see that the couple shared amusement at the depth of their own boredom. When Debré writes about this, she uses words ranging from ennui , literal boredom, to s’emmerder ,with the vulgar sense of being bored shitless. Writing about her changed life, Debré makes real the aus terity she needs to live and write. Many of us are so glutted with possessions that it would be absurd to list them, but Debré re peatedly runs down her short inventory. She wants close to noth ing, has abandoned the trappings of domesticity, dumped her lawyerly apparel, and retains only iconic basics: jeans, T-shirts, swim gear, laptop. When possessions accumulate, she purges them. Keeping her load light, she moves among low-rent studios and borrowed flats to the peaceful rooms of a writer’s residency to her father’s run-down house. This austere life, the narrator tells us, can be emotionally trying, but it’s what she’s decided to do. What she calls “the sys Lori O’Dea, a fiction writer and critic in Chicago, has appeared in LIBER , The Massachusetts Review , RainTaxi , Bridge , and others. 38

TheG & LR