“My mother died today. Or maybe yesterday”: the famously deadpan opening of L’Étranger (The Outsider) by Albert Camus. Love Me Tender starts in a similarly affectless mode, with an even more shocking declaration: “I don’t see why the love between a mother and son should be different from other kinds of love. Why we shouldn’t be allowed to stop loving each other.” A son can lose interest in his mother, but for a mother to sever relations with her son is sacrilege.
Except Constance (Love Me Tender is autofiction) has not abandoned her son, Paul, deliberately. Their relationship is a casualty of her sexuality. In her previous life, she was a Paris wife and mother, a lawyer, a good girl. When she left her 20-year marriage, a good-humoured joint custody was established. Single, Constance underwent a series of changes. She cut her hair, wore boys’ clothes, had “son of a bitch” tattooed across her stomach. She spent her days writing a novel and her nights chasing girls. But she was still a loving mother. At least, she was until she told her ex-husband, Laurent, that she was a lesbian and he responded by seizing custody of their eight-year-old son.
Paul hates you, he says, untruthfully. The visits stop. Weeks go by, a Berlin Wall of silence. After six months, Constance applies for divorce and joint custody, only to receive a deposition accusing her of incest and paedophilia. It includes passages taken from novels on Constance’s shelf, avant garde writers such as the Marquis de Sade, Jean Genet and Georges Bataille. The lawyer reads out passages from these fictions as if they apply directly to Constance’s life. In response, the judge grants Laurent sole custody while Constance is given supervised visitation, monitored by experts. One hour every 15 days. Next hearing, two years.
As the child of a lesbian mother myself, I read Constance’s taut, spare account of those two suspended years as a horror story, a nightmarish loss of autonomy and control, a deliberate ruination of love because of prejudice and malice. At the same time, there’s undeniable pleasure to be had from the way in which she reacts, her powerful evacuation of feeling, her sense of taking an automatic rifle to her past. She dismantles the remnants of “her straight life”, reducing her days to a spartan, disciplined cycle of swimming, writing, bars and girls, as she waits for things to change. “From now on,” she writes, “I’m a lonesome cowboy.”
It’s a deliberate occupation of the masculine. Tough-guy aesthetic, no feelings here. Constance is an outlaw in a leather jacket, stealing food from Franprix supermarkets. She throws her books and clothes away, gives up her apartment, abandons any trappings of comfort or femininity. The bare elements of her days are described in relentless lists: the contents of a sublet, the body of a lover, the halting, humiliatingly supervised meetings with Paul.
Debré favours long, run-on sentences, sometimes a page or more, broken by commas into declarative fragments, statements of flat and indisputable fact. Total control, with total chaos roiling behind. “The world is turning into a skeleton without any flesh.” It’s one of the most compulsive voices I’ve read in years.
Sex is a way of obliterating the self. “Girls, girls, more girls. I’m upping the dose just to feel the same effect… Like a convict counting off the days, I check them off, I make lists, I draw a tally on the wall.” Among its virtues, Love Me Tender is a great cruising novel, a forensic account of sex addiction and the wounds that might lie behind it, which simultaneously refuses to deny the pleasures to be had from severing the erotic from the romantic.
It’s also a vision of queer life that has nothing to do with identity or marriage or any of the new homonormative rites. This is queer in the old transgressive school of Lee Edelman’s No Future; queer as a rejection of conformity and security, that reveals “the family” as a device for accumulating and transferring privilege between generations. Constance refuses to capitulate, even as she fights for access to her son. “So yes, walking along the rooftops without a safety net, that’s the way I like it.” She chooses freedom. And what a price she pays for it.
Olivia Laing’s latest book, Everybody, is published by Picador (£20)
• Love Me Tender by Constance Debré (translated by Holly James) is published by Tuskar Rock (£12.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
