Constance Debré, born in 1972, is a French lawyer and novelist.
Constance Debré’s parents were journalist François Debré (1942–2020) and former model Maylis Ybarnégaray (1942–1988); the judge and politician Jean-Louis Debré is her uncle. Her grandparents included Michel Debré (1912–1996), former Prime Minister under General de Gaulle, and Jean Ybarnégaray (1883–1956), a minister of the Vichy regime and resistance fighter.
She was 16 when her mother died. She studied at Lycée Henri-IV, then law at Panthéon-Assas University. She is also a graduate of class 99 (E99) of the ESSEC Business School. She married in 1993 and had a son in 2008.
Working as a defence lawyer, she accompanied her father in 2011 when he was charged in an inquiry into fictitious jobs at the town hall of Paris. In 2013, she was elected second secretary of the Conference of Lawyers of the Paris Bar.
In 2015, she left her husband and her job to live with a woman and pursue a full-time career as a writer. In 2018, she won the Prix La Coupole for her autobiographical novel Play Boy, which describes the aftermath of this fateful decision: the custody battle over her son, and its associated pressures to conform to a “bourgeois” family model with a same-sex partner. It formed the first book in a trilogy.
(Wikipedia)
Debré on Minimalism and Excess
It approaches a zero degree of literature in its uncompromising directness (which dissolves the line between faithfulness and betrayal, constancy and distraction), but it is also the product of a compulsion to write, an excessive addiction to the written word.
- Debré, Constance. Love me Tender. Trans. Holly James. South Pasadena, CA: Semiotext(e), 2022.
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One of the narrator’s friends (they’ve known each other “for twenty years” [141]) “serves [her] Pontet-Canet, which I drink in the corner by the fire” (142). This is a reminder of a former life: these days, with her new friends and lovers, she is more likely to be having wine “from the box” (41); by contrast, Pontet-Canet is one of the most distinguished and notable of French labels. It is one of just sixty or so wineries included in the Bourdeaux Wine Official Classification of 1855. And although it is ”only” cinquième cru or “fifth growth” (premier cru wines include labels such as Lafite Rothschild, Latour, and Margaux), it is still, for the ordinary consumer, far too expensive: here in Vancouver, a bottle goes for almost $300 CAD, which is an order of magnitude more than I, at least, am accustomed to spend on a wine. Yet wine writer Hugh Johnson is a little snooty about it: “1961 was the last great vintage Pontet-Canet has made” (Hugh Johnson’s Modern Encyclopedia of Wine 54). It is possible that Debré is making a small dig at faded glories, or at taste that is just a little bit off.
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