Love Me Tender is as taut as the body its protagonist maintains through daily exercise: “I go swimming every day, I have a muscular back and shoulders.” She continues: “I have short hair that’s brown with a bit of grey at the front, I have part of a Caravaggio tattooed on my left arm and delicate lettering on my stomach that says Son of a Bitch.” After the narrator has itemised her appearance and frugal, almost monastic life – an ascetic existence, apart from compulsive sex with other women – she adds: “I don’t see my son any more; everything’s going well, he’s eight, he’ll be nine, then 10, then 11, his name is Paul, he’s great.”
This autofictional novel covers two tense years in the life of its author, here named as the character CD, who has come out as lesbian, left her 20-year marriage and is fighting her ex-husband for access, “not even joint custody”, but simply access to their child. “Just the right to see him and have him stay, every other weekend and half of school vacations.”
