“There’s always a price to pay for freedom,” says Constance Debré, running a hand over her shaved head and her neck tattoo that reads “plutôt crêver” (“rather die”). The 50-year-old author, who faced a fierce custody battle over her young son after coming out as gay in her mid 40s, adds: “To me, that’s a happier, livelier way to see things: rather than saying there are injustices or blows raining down on you, you realise it’s all because you’re living life in the way you want, seeking out an existence … trying to give life some shape. That’s why life and literature are so connected: it’s the quest for form.”
Debré tore up the rule book of French writing with a bestselling trilogy based on the dramatic turn her life took after she came out. The darkly comic, first-person account of a separated mother’s Don Juan-style conquests of women is interwoven with scenes of her “taking an automatic rifle” to her bourgeois life as a criminal defence barrister from a famous French political dynasty. More than a coming-out saga, Debré likens it to a Saint Augustine-style conversion, a total transformation. The protagonist and narrator, who is not named, is clearly Debré herself, following in a long French tradition of creative writers who draw closely on real-life events – the most notable being last year’s Nobel laureate Annie Ernaux. Yet though the events are real, Debré firmly considers her work fiction rather than autobiography or memoir, because it relies on the literary art of constructing a narrative, creating a relationship between a character and events. “What makes a novel is its form,” she says.
