Constance Debré's Playboy

5 short reflections on the first in a trilogy of autofictions documenting an attorney's midlife rediscovery of self

1. I picked up Playboy (Semiotext(e), 2024) with slightly lowered expectations, having first read Love Me Tender (2023) and finding it less engaging than expected given the buzz. The promo copy for both emphasized the author’s having given up her career as a lawyer to write novels, which didn’t necessarily seem like a point of intrigue for me; but still, I like texts written by outsiders, and the sleek poise of a trilogy of memoiristic novels about changing one’s life on a dime seemed worth exploring either way. Both book have a super-minimalist style that is frequently easier than it looks to pull off, and I always trust the taste of Semiotext(e) even when I don’t necessarily identify with the content. In this case, I’m glad I took another chance on reading Debré, as this volume—which actually is meant to come before Love Me Tender—hit me much more effectively, perhaps as a result of having failed to find what I wished for the first time.

2. While Love Me Tender took on Debré’s experience of motherhood after coming out as queer and leaving her husband, Playboy delves more deeply into her earliest sexual encounters with women and the impetus to break away from her heterosexual past. Both are written in a sequence of short, numbered vignettes that primarily rely on simple, first person sentences to relay the narrator’s experiences and opinions with a frequently refreshing directness that is sometimes shocking in its bald ability to admit views and feelings that others would never. Debré’s narrator is about as blunt and choppy as you could want, in a way that feels easy to trust even when disagreeable or even distasteful. Her greatest strength comes from being literal and practical about emotions and how they land, refusing to contextualize a personality in some attempt to make it more relatable. Instead, her narrative relies on mixing the low with the high, the common with the complex, giving space to daily minutiae that gathers meaning as it pools in around the larger gulf in the narrator’s life in the midst of change.