I Hate Books for the Happy Few: An Interview of Love Me Tender Author Constance Debré

interview and photographs by Sammy Loren

Until Semiotext(e) published Love Me Tender, Constance Debré was unknown in the United States. Like most French novelists, Debré’s life and literary career happen in Paris, a city she’s called home since birth, a city that seems to have shaped her classic French distaste for many current American cultural exports and obsessions. And perhaps it’s that Parisian je ne sais quoi that helps explain, in part, Love Me Tender’s splashy reception among American literati. Few foreign novels get translated and even fewer receive glowing reviews in The New Yorker, The Guardian, and The LA Review of Books. So why is this novel appealing to Americans? And what does its embrace say about US literature? 

Love Me Tender follows an unnamed narrator who abandons her bourgeois marriage and law job to become a writer. Along the way the protagonist loses custody of her young son after her spurned ex-husband weaponizes her newfound lesbianism against her. In a surreal literary twist, the ex-husband’s attorney convinces the courts that her collection of books by Genet, Bataille and de Sade prove her degeneracy and the embittered ex wins full custody. As the narrator’s legal appeals inch through the French courts, she writes, swims and takes many lovers, her months punctuated by awkward, chaperoned visits with her son at a state-run center once every fifteen days. Love Me Tender is a painful examination of motherhood, family and the lines an artist must draw between themself and the world. But it’s also a punky take on sex and freedom drawn from Debré’s own biography, though the novelist provocatively insists that the book is not ‘about’ her.

Reading the novel in LA during the waning days of 2022, I couldn’t help but see in it a rebuke of the current literary moment, one often critiqued as straight-jacketed by moral and social objectives. On the other hand Love Me Tender is deliciously French, the narrator unsentimental, blasé even about choosing literature over motherhood, responsibility, and the trappings of upper middle class life. 

Originally, Debré and I met at the LA launch of Love Me Tender in October, 2022. After inhaling the novel, I invited her to read at my reading series Casual Encountersz — I was curating one in Paris and Debré enthusiastically accepted. Though a health issue ultimately kept her from the event, we met the following afternoon at Chez Jeannette, a bistro in Strasbourg Saint Denis popular among Parisian artists, writers and glitterati. Debré, like the narrator in Love Me Tender, has a swimmer’s build and in person she’s warm and intellectual, kind of grand in her own way, gently tapping sugar crystals into an espresso, often palming her buzzed head of hair. Despite the lousy January weather, we sit outside, Debré across from me with her back to the street, just beyond Chez Jeannette’s awning. Though it drizzles throughout our conversation, Debré seems indifferent to the rain.

SAMMY LOREN: I really loved the book and found it very refreshing. No one is writing books like this in the US right now and I'm curious if you have any thoughts on the state of American literature.

CONSTANCE DEBRE: I'm gonna answer, but why do you have this feeling? 

LOREN: Well, I read a lot of contemporary literature, I'm following it. Many have MFAs and are focusing on identity. 

DEBRE: Something I hate, of course. There are many things I hate in literature. I hate books for the happy few. I really hate that. I hate psychology in literature. I hate sociology in books. I'm really fed up with trauma. I don't believe in identity. But I believe in the human condition, which is something we don't know what it is, but it's being crossed by many emotions and hidden feelings, this thing that drives a path through us. 

LOREN: Why don't you believe in identity? Can a belief in identity and the human condition not coexist at the same time?

DEBRE: I mean I don’t even know what people mean when they talk about identity. I feel things. I think things. I’m doing things. That’s how I would describe being a human being. I don't know how those external things people are referring to define our or their identities, or what that has to do with life as we really live it. I am sorry, but I really don't care about being a woman, or white, or French: it's there somewhere but so, so far away from what's really happening in my life, and of what interests me in my life or others. I read Dostoievsky and his characters are Russians, men who lived 150 years ago under the Tsars and yet I am, for instance, Ivan Karamazov more than myself. I am also Swann, Ishmael, etc. We are all the possible identities because identity is nothing, at the level which interests me. I can be Descartes, Blaise, Pascal. That is why I don’t have any problem identifying with people who have nothing to do with me. That’s what literature is all about, that we can talk to each other, even the dead with the living because we have something in common: the human condition, and the language to try to shape it. Identities and categories are useful, although always simplistic and vague, for sociology or marketing: not in art or literature, I think. Art or literature is about one topic: being, which means the one and the whole, the singularity and humanity, it's almost mathematical.

LOREN: Your writing style is very clean and direct. Which writers — French or American — influenced that stylistic choice and why is it important for this book to employ such simplicity of language?

DEBRE: Thank you for speaking of stylistic choice. Because it is. I used to be a lawyer and I loved law school. At some point I even almost became a law professor. And French law is very specific and different from US law. It's all based on written law — not case law — and on very specific language which is precise, clear, and effective. And I think — as many writers used to do — that it's the most beautiful style. I think the most beautiful thing about literature is the fact that it's so simple. One thing everyone has is language. I love the simplicity of language, which can be understood by everyone. The aim is not to prove that you have read Spinoza or that you go to museums or art shows. That’s one of the reasons my sentences are very short. My vocabulary is very simple. I decided to write like that because I wanted my book to be very direct. And — regarding French law or my stylistic choice — it's also related to a political conception: it has to be immediately understood and more, felt by anyone. It has to work, and to work on everybody possibly, and not only on a few super educated people. I hate that boring French bourgeois tendency. A good book is about what all of us have in common, what makes us human, not about our little singularities and snobisms. I am influenced by a pair of jeans, William Eggleston’s photography, or Terry Richardson’s or Tillmans’, by music from Bach to rock ‘n’ roll to rap, by the beauty and simplicity of American English: by our modernity. From all of that I make my style. Writing about things Dostoievsky and Shakespeare and Conrad and Hugo and those kinds of writers have written about. I don’t read a lot of contemporary literature, I have to confess. 

LOREN: I'm curious how you describe Love Me Tender. Is it a memoir? Fiction? A mix of both? 

DEBRE: It's a novel. Everything is true. The main character is made out of me. And the events are representations of true events. But it's not at all a memoir. It's not about me. The difference is that there is a form. I mean, you can take a chair or me or anything, but the thing is to find a form that has a meaning. And the meaning is not the meaning which is written, it's the meaning that helps us to live. 

LOREN: What are your thoughts on autofiction? Do you see a distinction between fiction and autofiction? 

DEBRE: Distinction? It depends what you do about it. Because it could be a memoir, for instance, or it could be something completely different. What is very interesting is the first person and I have been very interested in this question. The moment you choose to write in the first person you experience something that has no evidence. You don't know what it is. So, that's exactly the evidence that identity is a narrative. It's not something true. So this, I, what is I? Okay, I am having a coffee. I can say that. What does it mean? What is this I? When you try to write in the first person, you have to decide what you're gonna put in this I. I mean, I'm not interested at all about telling my own story, or in this literature of talking about all the little dramas of personal life and of childhood, I'm just fed up with it to tell you the truth. 

LOREN: You spoke about writing in the first person and how this proves that identity is 'narrative.' I wonder if you can expand on this concept. 

DEBRE: The first person is great in literature. It works instantaneously. Think of “Call me Ishmael” or “Longtemps je me suis couché de bonne heure” [“For a long time I used to go to bed early”],which are the opening sentences of Moby-Dick and À la recherche du temps perdu [Remembrances of Things Past]. We identify immediately with a book’s first person, and we follow the voice, the character. This is something almost magical. The character who says I has a strength no other has: he’s the one telling the story. And this power is what we readers are looking for when we open a book. And yes, if identity exists, it is moving, and up to us, it's a narrative and not an origin, it’s the way you tell stories and the way you walk, not where you come from. It is the form we give to everything. And this is where freedom lies, in the form we chose. 

LOREN: Reading the book, I kept thinking of punk music for some reason, like, it had a punky spirit. Do you listen to music when you write?

DEBRE: A little, yeah. I mean I'm not, not listening to music, but like anyone living there's music, movies, there's this culture around me: punk music, rock music, rap music, classical music. But it's another thing I think we have in music and a little bit in movies, but more in music, much more than in books: transgression. Literature in some ways can be much more conventional these days than music.

LOREN: What do you think is driving that? Why do you think literature is more conventional these days than other art forms?

DEBRE: Oh my goodness, I don't know, but listen, there are many reasons. Everyone is very cautious now, publishers and writers as well, because they're afraid of being canceled.

LOREN: Do you feel like that's a big fear in France?

DEBRE: Less than in the US, but yes. For instance, that's why I didn’t want to present a main character that would have been too easily likable. She’s a mother and the story with the son is very sad and unfair. And she's a lesbian, so it would have been very easy to represent her as a victim. I didn't want that. That’s why I emphasize that the character is not complaining, she's not explaining anything. And I wanted her to be a lesbian but not in a bourgeois way and for many lesbians that’s not a ‘good’ way to be a lesbian. I wanted there to be some discomfort. That's the trick when you write in the first person and the main character is made out of yourself: the moral obligation is to draw a character, which is not completely likable.

LOREN: Especially when the writing has many parallels to one's own life. Like, you could paint the character as the most sympathetic version of itself. Sort of like, everybody be nice to me and like me, you know? 

DEBRE: Yeah, writing about me is fine, okay, I'm gonna gonna write about me, but it's not me. But I do have, I mean, I have the obligation to be a bit scary too. And, if I want to represent a lesbian in these times where actually it's very acceptable to be one, to be gay, I mean, nowadays in our countries, it's, I'm sorry, it's extremely easy and it's almost trendy. But if being gay is being a ‘good gay,’ I want to represent a lesbian who is not ‘good,’ who doesn’t want to have one partner, that’s more fun. 

LOREN: Maybe the most interesting part of Love Me Tender to me was where you write about what you basically just said, which is when the protagonist concludes that if she had left her husband only to keep practicing law and to get together with a similar upper class woman and was a conventional bourgeois lesbian, it wouldn’t have meant anything. Why is this radicalism central to the character’s project? 

DEBRE: Yeah, I think the more radical thing is refusing money to dictate her choices, to write whatever the price is, even if it means to have no money and then lose her son. To do what she wants to do.

LOREN: Did you notice any differences between the way the book was received in France and in the US? I'm curious about how the reception has been different, like how do audiences see the book for you?

DEBRE: I'm very happy with the American reception because I think in France, well, it depends, but some people were a bit more interested in me. They thought it was about me telling a story about myself. No, it's great, this girl, she used to be a lawyer, and then she did everything to become a writer and she cut her hair. And this is not important at all. But in the US I think the radicality has been seen through the language itself.  

LOREN: Why was it important for you that the protagonist not be perceived as a victim in the novel?

DEBRE: Because I don’t believe in a world of victims and the guilty. I don’t believe in innocence and am not interested in it. We are all victims and we’re all guilty. We are sinners and we are pure as the newborn. It is the human condition. Moreover, we are all the innocence and the guilt of one another. It is something complex but absolutely certain. This is much more interesting and beautiful than a world of victims and oppressors, which is a boring and dangerous lie.

Thought Girl Winter: An Interview Of Nada Alic

interview by Annabel Graham
portraits by Paige Strabala

I first met Nada Alic in the fall of 2019, in New York, at a literary reading held at the Nolita headquarters of a women’s sleepwear brand. The small storefront was packed, and readers perched on the edge of a gigantic feather bed in the center of the room. Most of the guests were there to see a certain Instagram poet with an especially rabid fan base—I witnessed actual tears of joy when said poet opened her mouth—but it was Alic who captured my attention. Radiating her trademark blend of confidence, self-deprecation, and deadpan humor, she read from a short story in progress. In it, an anxious, painfully cerebral young woman questions “this whole business of being alive,” pursues an obsessive friendship with a woman named Mona, and considers the pros and cons of lightly grazing her hand across a stranger’s penis. At a cocktail party with her husband’s business associates, Alic’s narrator muses: “They all looked so vulnerable, so up for grabs; concealed only by a thin layer of fabric. I imagined them as windchimes waiting to be struck. The impulse wasn’t sexual, it was destructive. I just stood there, not touching anyone’s penis, quietly frightened by who I was and what I was capable of.” Suffice it to say that I was riveted.

Alic and I struck up a conversation after the reading, exchanged email addresses, and made loose plans to get together for a coffee next time I was in Los Angeles, where she lives. What followed almost immediately was a global pandemic, a government-imposed lockdown, and a 19th-century sort of pen-pal correspondence conducted over the entire year of 2020. Alic’s emails are just as surprising and enjoyable as her short fiction—witty, dark, vulnerable, sharp-edged; weird in all the best ways. The story she read that night in New York (featuring the penis-windchime simile that’s eternally burned into my brain) is now entitled “My New Life”—this past year, it was published in the literary journal No Tokens, where I serve as fiction editor. You can read it here.

2021 was a landmark year for Alic—she married her partner (Ryan Hahn, of the indie band Local Natives), and sold her short story collection, Bad Thoughts, to Knopf, in a two-book deal (her second book, a novel, is slated for release in 2023). The title Bad Thoughts stems from the eponymous Instagram series Alic created in 2020 during quarantine, wherein she posted bimonthly lists of Tweet-like aphorisms that were at once wildly humorous, razor-sharp, and deeply relatable. The stories in the collection—which will be published in July 2022—are brash and heady, breaking established rules of narrative and form. Like the Instagram series, they’re also delightfully funny. In one, the spirit of an unborn child hovers over the bodies of its future parents, willing them to copulate and bring it into embodied existence. In another, a woman’s musician boyfriend goes on tour, leaving her alone in their home for the first time ever; she proceeds to question all of her life choices and tumble down a frighteningly familiar Internet rabbit hole; chaos and body dysmorphia ensue. Alic is well-versed in the awkward, writing into our most neurotic, shameful habits and thought patterns with an unparalleled acuity.

For Autre, I sat down with Alic in her Mount Washington living room to talk about the holiness of humor, becoming an artist with no formal training, and the archetype of the eternal child-god. We’re real-life friends now—a true privilege!—but sometimes I miss our extremely long emails.  

ANNABEL GRAHAM: What was your path to becoming a writer?

NADA ALIC: I came up in the 2008ish blogging era; a famously naïve and earnest era of the internet that had yet to be colonized by brands and pathological cynicism. I wrote about music, mostly. I loved music in such a pure and unselfconscious way. I had no ambition to become a writer; I just wanted to support my friends, go to shows, be in that world. Writing was my way in. It wasn’t until my late twenties that I started writing fiction. I would send short stories to my friend Andrea [Nakhla, who is a painter and illustrator], and she would visually interpret them with paintings and drawings, and we made zines together, for fun. Making zines feels incredibly wholesome and old-timey now—I recently had the humbling experience of explaining what a zine was to a 22-year-old. I continued writing short stories from then on, but I never thought of myself as a Writer, and didn’t until about five minutes ago. This was due to my core wound of not having an MFA and never once having lived in New York. I tried compensating for this by reading Twitter, submitting to literary mags, and attending a writing workshop in abandoned strip mall in North Hollywood. Each experience was like passing a test, and I’d emerge with a tiny crumb of belief in myself. 

The paradigm shift towards becoming a writer was very slow; it was largely internal, but also required some external factors to align: getting an artist visa, saving up money, quitting my job, getting my own health insurance, finding freelance work to support me through the transition. Just a lot of boring, admin stuff. I felt like I had so much to prove. I still do. But the benefit of feeling like an outsider in the literary world is that it motivated me to work really hard. I felt like there was so much I didn’t know, so I had to seriously commit to the work and forge my own path in the absence of any formal infrastructure or connections or community.

GRAHAM: Did you read a lot as a kid? 

ALIC: I enjoyed reading as a kid, but I didn’t grow up in a super intellectual environment. My parents were working class Croatian immigrants; they didn’t have the time for literature and art. That’s not to say they weren’t smart; they were and are far more competent than me in almost every way; they can build a house from scratch, hunt and prepare meat, keep children alive, etc. They could easily survive the apocalypse, whereas I will die within hours of losing my contacts. What they did give me was lots of free time to play, imagine, dance, terrorize my sister, etc. I didn’t start reading for pleasure until my early twenties; mostly just books I’d find in thrift stores. I remember performatively reading guys like Steinbeck, Bukowski and David Foster Wallace because pretentious boys in beanies kept referencing them. It wasn’t until I discovered contemporary fiction writers like Sheila Heti and Tao Lin that I realized what writing could be. Those writers made writing feel accessible and real and exciting to me.     

GRAHAM: How are you finding the process of working on a novel? What are you encountering that’s more or less challenging than writing short stories?

ALIC: The story for the novel came to me fully-formed. I felt like I had to pay attention to it, because none of my short stories had come out that way. Writing the story collection was like feeling my way around in the dark. In a lot of ways, I was learning how to write through the process of writing the collection. I didn’t really have a plan or a vision other than “keep going” and “don’t be bad.” My biggest challenge has been sustaining the potency of the short story within a longer form. I don’t want to lose that; I still want every moment to feel funny and alive.

GRAHAM: How do ideas for stories usually come to you? Do you start with a particular element? An image, question, atmosphere, or character?

ALIC: I keep a notes document for random thoughts, ideas, dreams, etc. Often it’ll be about a humiliating or painful encounter that I’ve either observed or experienced, and I’ll want to diffuse it of its power over me. Then I’ll take that idea and stretch it out beyond its limits into absurdity. Like with “The Intruder,” for example, that came from a real experience I had mistaking a friend’s boyfriend for an intruder breaking into my apartment. I was really tired and overworked and somehow forgot I had [house]guests. I woke up in the middle of the night and saw a dark shadowy figure and panicked. I basically jumped out of bed and tried to defend myself before realizing what was happening. It was one of the most embarrassing experiences of my life. In the story, the protagonist doubles down on her paranoia and submits to the fantasy that someone really is out there, watching her, waiting. Submitting to her delusions paradoxically gives her some semblance of control. Most of my characters suffer from some form of delusional thinking, and there’s a lot of humor in that. Humor is a useful device for confronting and overcoming shame, which is my life’s purpose.   

GRAHAM: What’s your writing process like? Do you have any routines?

ALIC: I sort of cringe when people talk about their process as if they’re the ultimate authority on it. I remember early on, after I quit my job and committed myself to writing full time, I read a lot about what other people had to say about their creative processes and it really affected me. It just set me up to fail. It was a lot of like, “I wake up at 5am and write till noon, then I eat a cracker and stretch and keep writing till dinner…” I’m very suspicious of that kind of self-mythologizing. Most people who say they write every day are full of shit. Even if they do, who cares? Keep it to yourself! Stop bullying us! Process has very little to do with good art. Reading about how prolific a writer is has never once compelled me to write. I don’t know, maybe it helps other people? 

I still don’t really have a routine. I make space for solitude and work every day, but sometimes life gets in the way and I try to forgive myself. The hardest thing for me was unlearning a lot of capitalist programming that had been burned into my brain from years of working in the corporate world. I had to learn to be okay with “wasting time” and letting go of my obsession with productivity. I’m very slow and inconsistent, but I also have this very dogged, Slavic commitment to the work in a bigger, cosmic sense. I feel like larger forces are at work, guiding me. Or haunting me, actually. I can’t really explain it.  

GRAHAM: You write about the Internet a lot, and you started an Instagram series entitled Bad Thoughts. What’s your relationship to the Internet like?

ALIC: The internet is so seductive and shiny and infinite, so I have to take mini-breaks or block certain sites for a while in order to spiritually recalibrate. Sometimes I really do confuse it for reality and forget that I’m located in space and time, contained inside a body, etc. That’s when I need to just get up and pee and go for a little human walk outside, feel my blood move. 

For Bad Thoughts (the Instagram series), I just had a lot of fear and I wanted to get over myself. When you’re working on something in private for a long time, it can start to feel too precious. I needed to break the spell and stop overthinking it. I just started sharing random thoughts that came to me in a quick and unpolished way. I knew I was going to feel embarrassed, but that was the point. I comforted myself by thinking, whatever, this isn’t my real work. But once I started doing it, it was like this portal opened up in my mind and ideas started pouring in. Not to be a witch or whatever, but I do feel like I was tapping into a spiritual plane through my subconscious mind. It was an interesting experiment. But like with anything, once I started taking it too seriously, or cared too much about what people thought, I knew I had to stop because I didn’t want it to become another “thing” that I did. The ego will identify with anything, even if that thing is meant to set you free. It’s like what Ram Dass says: “all methods are traps.” I might do it again when I’m a little more enlightened, who knows. 

GRAHAM: What do you like, or not like, about living in Los Angeles as a writer and artist?

ALIC: I worked really hard to be able to move to LA and stay here, so I have this immigrant humility and gratitude that colors my entire experience of being here. Even my worst days offer this consolation of, “at least I’m in Los Angeles.” When you grow up in Canada, America is this mythic place that only celebrities and millionaires can move to. You’d take a day trip to Niagara Falls and be like, wow, I’m in America. It’s been eight years and I’m still walking around like, wow, I’m in America! So cool! Figuring out how to live here on my own gave me the confidence to pursue bigger things.

Most of my friends [here] are musicians and visual artists, and being surrounded by them helped accelerate my own creative ambitions. There was a safety to not being in the [center of the] literary world, too. I didn’t know any other writers, so I could just do my own thing. I had the freedom to experiment [with writing] without the pressure of turning it into a career. Writing professionally hadn’t even occurred to me; I was still driving three hours a day to and from my shitty office job and writing on the weekends. I think if I lived in New York, I would have been too affected by the competitive energy. Whenever I’m there I feel exhausted and out of place and I don’t know what anyone is talking about. I need to go home and sit in a dark room alone for a while to recover.

GRAHAM: Since the pandemic, my reading habits have changed so much—I have a much shorter attention span and much less patience, and I won’t stick with something for more than about fifty pages if I don’t find it compelling. I’ve found it a bit more difficult during this time to find books that grip me throughout, but yours did. It is literary and cerebral, but it’s also incredibly fun, and funny, and uplifting, which feels like the best kind of medicine right now.

ALIC: Thank you so much. I try not to ever take myself too seriously, and I knew I wanted to write something light and fun and enjoyable. A lot of people conflate Serious Art with trauma and darkness, and there is a lot of great art that emerges from pain, but humor and silliness feel just as holy to me. Life can be so brutal, and humor can really soften the blow. I can see how it can be a defense mechanism too—my inability to be purely earnest without adding a little wink to everything. I admire people who have to courage to write honestly about their lives. I know some people say art is not entertainment, but I really tried to entertain. I really considered the reader’s experience, and I wanted it to be joyful.    

GRAHAM: Would you say there’s an idea or theme that’s emerged in your work, or something you keep circling around?

ALIC: Broadly speaking, Bad Thoughts deals with women who are sort of stagnating at the precipice of a threshold, stuck in their own thoughts, feeling estranged from themselves and the world. I recently read this book called Puer Aeternus (Latin for “eternal child-god) by the Jungian analyst Marie-Louise von Franz, who coined the term “Peter Pan Syndrome.” She mostly writes about men, but briefly mentions the female version of this archetype, which is called a “Puella.” These women resist crossing over various thresholds to adulthood, namely the more heteronormative milestones of marriage and motherhood. This represents a bigger resistance to confronting their own mortality. Especially with motherhood, which is the ultimate death for a Puella. As much as it is expansive and generative, it reduces a woman to her earthbound body. Her body undergoes a transformation, and she emerges changed. She becomes a new person with a new life. But who will she become? What is that life? I’m not making any moral judgements for or against, I’m more exploring the anxiety that comes with this human experience. 

That anxiety has been amplified by the fact that we now conduct a large part of our lives online, on screens—it allows for this more disembodied experience of reality. We can happily live in the domain of the mind and of our online personas. There are many valid reasons for feeling stunted, or even disenchanted with the prospect of “growing up.” There’s a pervasive nihilism and hopelessness [when it comes to thinking about] the future; [sometimes even] an inability to imagine a future. I think a lot of people assume that only men grapple with [this], and women are just waiting around for them to get their shit together and give them a baby—but women struggle, too. Taking anything from the realm of the imagination or spirit into the material world is scary and limiting—like putting out a book. It’s a kind of baby. I can’t control what will become of it, and maybe that’ll be good for me.