A provocative and fierce novel about motherhood, self-discovery and defiance

'Destined to become a classic of its kind' Maggie Nelson 'One of the most compulsive voices I've read in years' Olivia Laing, Observer When Constance told her ex-husband that she was dating women, he made a string of unfounded accusations that separated her from her young son, Paul. Laurent trained Paul to say he no longer wants to see his mother, and the judge believed him. She approaches this new life with passionate intensity and the desire for an unencumbered existence, certain that no love can last. Apart from cigarettes, two regular lovers and women she has brief affairs with, Constance's approach is monastic and military - she swims daily, reads, writes, and returns to small or borrowed rooms for the night. A starkly beautiful account of impossible sacrifices asked from mothers, Love Me Tender is a bold novel of defiance, freedom and self-knowledge.

"A story that's quietly heartbreaking and fiercely defiant" - Spectator

"Intense... a character striving mightily for authenticity and honesty, questioning and rending the veil of social norms, acknowledging the Absurd, in hopes of finding some more solid, albeit subjective, truth" - Harper's

"One of the most compulsive voices I've read in years ... there's undeniable pleasure to be had from the way in which she reacts, her powerful evacuation of feeling, her sense of taking an automatic rifle to her past... a vision of queer life that has nothing to do with identity or marriage or any of the new homonormative rites" - Observer

"A compulsive read, this is for fans of Virginie Despentes, Hervé Guibert and Guillaume Dustan" - AnOther magazine best books feature

"Debré's writing aims to eradicate all origins and backstories, and with them the social roles they enforce, replacing them with an ethos of radical self-fashioning ... Debré's sprezzatura writing is the literary equivalent of a shrug: a swashbuckling 'Et alors?" - New Left Review

"Constance's voice is extremely strong - sharp, assertive, acerbic, and wholly convincing" - Buzz Magazine

"Love Me Tender is, without a trace of coyness, a love letter, both to a child and to a queer woman's own becoming. As for Constance - both the author and her fictional counterpart - you root for her all the way." - Guardian

"Ferocious emotional honesty ... A bracing read and a timely reminder that attitudes are often far slower to change than legislation" - Irish Times

"Tight, present-tense prose (in a crisp translation by Holly James) ... genuinely inspiring" - Financial Times

"Painfully beautiful" - London Magazine

"it is easy to see why comparisons have been drawn between her work and that of Camus. Yet, there is something absolutely unique and uniquely compulsive to Debré's story ... daring and unputdownable, this is fiction at its most transgressive and transcendent" - Foyles, Top 10 Translated Fiction 2023

"Love Me Tender, a bold and beautiful book, is precise and pared back. Debré's is a process of reducing and reducing" - PORT Magazine