Author on Tour: Constance Debré

About Constance Debré

Constance Debré left her career as a lawyer to become a writer. She is the author of a trilogy of novels: Playboy (Play Boy, Stock; trans. by Holly James, Semiotext(e), 2024), Love Me Tender (Love Me Tender, Flammarion; trans. by Holly James, Semiotext(e), 2022), and No Name (Nom, Flammarion; trans. & release date TBA, Semiotext(e)). In 2022, she was a resident at Villa Albertine.

About Playboy

(trans. by Holly James, Semiotext(e), 2024)

First published in France in 2018, Playboy is the first volume of Constance Debré’s renowned autobiographical trilogy that describes her decision, at age forty-three, to abandon her marriage, her legal career, and her bourgeois Parisian life to become a lesbian and a writer.

The novel unfolds in a series of short, sharp vignettes. The narrator’s descriptions of her first female lovers—a married woman fifteen years older than her, a model ten years her junior—are punctuated by encounters with her ex-husband, her father, and her son.

Looking at the world through fresh eyes, the narrator of Playboy questions everything that once lay beneath the surface of her well-managed life. Laconic, aggressive, and radically truthful, she examines gender and marriage, selfishness and sacrifice, money and family, even the privilege inherent in her downward mobility.

Playboy will be released in the United States in April 2024.

Find more information here.

Program

Constance Debré will be on tour in the US in April 2024.

Her public program will include:

• Sunday, Apr 7: conversation with Sasha Frere-Jones @ Albertine (New York, NY) – event in English;
• Tuesday, Apr 9: conversation @ Princeton University (Princeton, NJ) – event in French;
• Wednesday, Apr 17: conversation @ UC Berkeley (Berkeley, CA) – event in English.

For more information, please email Valentine Richet at valentine.richet@villa-albertine.org.