Constance Debré has long since established herself as one of the most compelling new voices in French literature. Meet the star author in conversation with journalist Lotte Folke Kaarsholm at REPUBLIQUE.
She made her debut in 2019 with the autofictional novel "Playboy", which attracted major attention in France, and achieved her international breakthrough with "Love Me Tender" – an uncompromising autofictional novel about sexuality, freedom, love, and motherhood in contemporary Paris, written with punk-like energy and razor-sharp prose.
Now the final part of the trilogy, "The Name", has just been published in Danish, providing the occasion for another encounter with Debré, who in 2025 was interviewed by Bodil Skovgaard Nielsen at REVOLVER with a sold-out audience.
Debré writes as if in one long inhalation, creating a sense of intimacy and familiarity with her – and, honestly, making one wish to be homeless too, or to have plutôt crever (“rather die”) tattooed across one’s neck.
In "Playboy", she writes: “I am rich, without so much as a penny in my pocket. Without an apartment. Rich, yet living on ten euros a day, cigarettes included. Rich, yet owning nothing – so rich that I don’t care about being poor. Technically homeless, but ontologically loaded with money.”
Debré rejects wealth and permanence of residence, embracing a voluntary downward mobility, and her uncompromising way of shaping her life is deeply admirable. An avenger through writing, whom we are honoured to welcome back in close collaboration with Vinter Forlag and Bogforum.
An award-winning French author born into a family of prominent politicians, she is the granddaughter of Michel Debré, who served as Prime Minister under Charles de Gaulle. Trained as a lawyer, she worked for twenty years as a high-profile criminal defence attorney before, at the age of 43, leaving behind her comfortable bourgeois life, prestigious career, luxury apartment in Paris, and husband of twenty years to pursue a freer life as a lesbian and writer.