Read Our Interview of Love Me Tender Author Constance Debré →

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. Read more.

Tea Hacic-Vlahovic's Debut Memoir-Cum-Milanese Fever Dream Is Now Available

Tea Hacic is an MDMA-fueled Oscar Wilde with fake eyelashes and this book is a Fear and Loathing for the late Berlusconi-era; a deep walk of shame that tiptoes between a bewildering Bildungsroman and a fever dream of social climbing and social embarrassment. Click here to order now online and in print.

Read Our Review Of Kim-Anh Schreiber's New Book Fantasy

text by Summer Bowie

When planning a pregnancy or discussing the process of birth, we often hear about the rebirth that the mother experiences—her renaissance as woman with child, giver of life, and newborn unto herself. It’s such a beautiful image when you ignore the suicide that was planned for the woman who once was. Thus is the balance of life and death, and it's one that some of us contend with more readily than others. Nothing is more apparent than this in Kim-Anh Schreiber’s Fantasy, wherein the book’s titular figure is the daughter of a mother who never stops mourning the life she should have had; her inescapable Karma. 

This cross-genre novel is a disembodied lung desperately inflating and deflating itself with stale cigarette smoke and the decades-old dust of whatever room you’re sitting in. It’s a work of autofiction that is equally exposed and pregnable as it is a fictitious hallucination woven like a cosmic braid with scenes from Nobuhiko Obayashi’s 1977 film, House. The intergenerational sorority of aunts, mother, and grandmother that represent the author’s Vietnamese refugee matrilineage become interchangeable with Obayashi’s highly Westernized depiction of archetypal Japanese schoolgirls and the dubious matriarchs who haunt them. The spaces within the house hold formative and traumatic memories alike. They contain cultures of sexually repressed, sisterly perversions that are devoid of sexuality, yet brimming with desire. Schreiber is wont to illustrate scenes in much the same way as Obayashi—little comedic horrors that drip with Agent Orange and irradiated uranium (respectively) over postwar rubble both seen and unseen. House makes a perfect companion for this book in the way that it depicts the domicile as a metaphor for the body. A cell that contains the bodies of all the women who have kept it.

In Fantasy, mother tongue is laced with the mysterious motherland in a braid that spans the Pacific Ocean. A language spoken between grandmother and granddaughter flourishes and fades in this boat they call home, its orbit so wide one forgets that it’s indeed moving. Only her mother’s constant motion is detected as she skirts in and out on an outlet designer dingy, leaving an inexplicably large wake each time on her way out. You can trace the roots of words that have died in the wisps that fly out of one loop or the next, having provided the foundation of their intercontinental bridge, they take an unceremonious bow and quietly escape the lexicon of their nomadic identity. “Ever since I was a little girl, I have lived in a fantastic theatron: a seeing place whose walls keep disappearing, transforming to mask, fly, tease, or torment, and beyond the walls are nothingness, and three generations of women live with me, entering through the door to rehearse their magical future, every character brought down by their character, by the desire to look good as themselves for themselves, and I alone see them, I alone beholding my house, my body, my ghosts and my gods, and my screen that is suddenly a cannibal.”

Am I really so porous that someone could just bleed into me? asks Khaos, a recurring figure whose only identifying characteristics are Daughter Flower, pregnant. Flowers constitute the form of certain characters at times, nourish them at others, and press their withering bodies into the pages of a history book from a forgotten land. Having meticulously studied a smorgasbord of allegories that portray women stuck in houses such as Mekong Hotel, Keeping Up with the Kardashians, Pretty Little Liars, The Virgin Suicides, and so on, Schreiber takes an incisive look at the corporal quality of our deepest psychic understandings and the umbilical cord that carries our identity from one body to the next. She is indefatiguably distinguishing one X from the other in her chromosomal set, knowing that there isn’t a corpus callosum dividing her dual identities, but rather an extensive sequence of yins and yangs swirling; an infinite loop of chain-smoking daisies propelling the turbine of life and death. Like the avatars of an ancient goddess, they circulate the dust that gathers in the corners of the epigenetic house, floating ubiquitously through the air, carrying traces of every dead and living thing that ever graced it with their presence.

Fantasy features cover art by Sojourner Truth Parsons and is published by Sidebrow Books. Click here to preorder. Follow Kim-Anh Schreiber on Instagram.