“What is your name? My name is Nobody, a name is nothing, like family, like childhood, I don’t believe in it, I don’t want it.” Constance Debré has a grand name – her grandfather was the prime minister who drafted the French constitution – and she’s long been trying to disgrace it. She is driven by a mixture of petulant rebellion, existential longing for erasure and revolutionary anarchism. A decade ago she left behind her husband, job as a criminal defence lawyer, furniture and crockery to embark on a new life of casual sex with women and iconoclastic, fervent writing.
Following Love Me Tender and Playboy, Name is the final instalment in the autofictional trilogy where, with fury, disdain and panache, Debré has recorded her revulsion at bourgeois life and at the legal system that allowed her ex-husband to remove their son because of her homosexual promiscuity and writing. Now, as she witnesses her father dying, she goes further in renouncing family, childhood and the name she hopes can die with him – though it’s nonetheless emblazoned on the cover.
