I’m upping the dose just to feel the effect.” She is as addicted to sex as she is to swimming or to Marlboro Lights.Īs a butch lesbian, CD’s masculinity is a liberating reversal of the traditional male power her ex uses against her. This CD attempts to assuage with “Girls, girls, and more girls.
The parallel tale to her forced estrangement from her son is one of new beginnings: of living a more authentic life, despite an underlying aching loneliness. CD is at last, in her late 40s, attaining her own identity and through Constance Debré’s spare, functional prose, in a sinewy translation by Holly James, this is thrilling to witness. Yet the novel – or novella, as it runs to less than 200 pages – is not bleak, or not entirely. It’s the time passing with no cutoff point, it’s the lawyers, the judges, the experts, the association, it’s the nausea, it’s the fatigue.” This is, without a trace of coyness, a love letter, both to a child and to a queer woman’s own becoming CD’s despair in these moments is eloquent: “It wouldn’t be so bad if I at least had something to hold on to. Even when a small portion of time is assigned for mother and child to meet, it is frequently sabotaged by the father. (It is CD’s viewpoint alone that is rivetingly played out here.) Her ex-husband, Laurent, uses her queerness to make outrageous accusations – such as his claim that “mental instability” evolves from homosexuality – which are routinely accepted by the authorities and prevent her from seeing Paul, who often repeats by rote what his father has instructed him to say. I have rarely read an account that so wincingly exposes the bitterness and manipulations of a marriage gone awry, the power of the state and, in the case of CD, its unrelenting homophobia and misogyny. “Just the right to see him and have him stay, every other weekend and half of school vacations.” This autofictional novel covers two tense years in the life of its author, here named as the character CD, who has come out as lesbian, left her 20-year marriage and is fighting her ex-husband for access, “not even joint custody”, but simply access to their child. L ove Me Tender is as taut as the body its protagonist maintains through daily exercise: “I go swimming every day, I have a muscular back and shoulders.” She continues: “I have short hair that’s brown with a bit of grey at the front, I have part of a Caravaggio tattooed on my left arm and delicate lettering on my stomach that says Son of a Bitch.” After the narrator has itemised her appearance and frugal, almost monastic life – an ascetic existence, apart from compulsive sex with other women – she adds: “I don’t see my son any more everything’s going well, he’s eight, he’ll be nine, then 10, then 11, his name is Paul, he’s great.”
0 kommentar(er)
