On Playboy & Love Me Tender

Constance Debré in dialogue with Zino Wey – Text read by Marie Rosa Tietjen – Music by Laura Landergott

She was married to her husband for twenty years, in which they lived together, loved each other, were bored together, had a son together, until one day she decided to leave. In her novel Playboy, Constance Debré looks back on her life before the metamorphosis – on being raised by drug-addicted parents, on her career as a lawyer, and on the Parisian bourgeoisie and their ideas of happiness found within the nuclear family constellation. Until the moment came, when she radically broke with her bourgeois existence, got divorced, gave up her secure employment to devote herself entirely to writing, and started sleeping with women.

Following the internationally acclaimed book Love Me Tender, Playboy is the prequel of a queer woman’s life story – a woman breaking with established social norms to live a life in the way so many men have done before her.

The curating artists Zino Wey, Marie Rosa Tietjen and Laura Landergott have invited the author to talk about and read from her work. The talk will be held in English; texts are read in the German translation.

Constance Debré, born in Paris in 1972, worked as a criminal defence lawyer before she devoted herself to writing. Her novels include Play Boy (Stock, 2018), Love Me Tender (Flammarion, 2020), Nom (Flammarion, 2022), and Offenses (Flammarion, 2023). She currently teaches as visiting professor at Peter Szondi Institute for Comparative Literary Studies (FU Berlin).