Playboy is part one of a trilogy that draws on the life of its author, Constance Debré. Part two, Love Me Tender, was published in Britain last year. The trilogy was inspired by Debré’s experience of leaving her husband, abandoning her career as a lawyer, and then losing custody of her child when she re-emerged as a lesbian (and a writer). In Love Me Tender we met a womaniser who referred to girls by numbers rather than their names; in Playboy, via her first female lovers, we witness her transformation into a queer Casanova. The novel is bold and brash and at the same time quietly controlled. Take this line: ‘We’re all selfish, parents, kids, he, I, it’s no big deal, that’s life, it’ll all be fine.’
First up is Agnès, an older, married woman who will never leave her husband: ‘She’s a woman set in her ways, adding things to things, lining up all her little boxes without ever choosing one, without ever throwing anything away.’ Next comes Albertine, known as Albert, the young and beautiful daughter of a friend of Debré’s father, a model with soft skin and a puppyish smell. ‘At the age of four I was homosexual,’ Debré writes. ‘I knew full well and so did my parents. After that it kind of passes. Now it’s coming back. It’s as simple as that.’
In between looking at girls on the street and on the metro, she encounters her father, her ex-husband and her son. She sheds pieces of clothing and furniture and rents a one-bed apartment in the sixth arrondissement of Paris. She starts swimming six times a week, taking pleasure in the movements, ‘my body extending, stretching, gliding’. She shaves her head and gets a tattoo – ‘a collection of minuscule details that ended up changing the way I walk, the way I talk, maybe even the way I think’.
Translated from French by Holly James, Debré’s prose is pared back, her chapters brief. She’s brilliantly deadpan about money and marriage, sex, desire and domesticity. Which isn’t to say the book lacks warmth. It’s there when she comes out to her son – ‘Afterwards he was very tender with me. He came into the kitchen to give me a kiss. He said he loved me’ – and in her first sexual experience with Agnès: ‘I see all her beauty, the beauty of women, I see my own body, new. I tell myself there are lots of things that are possible.’
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