hot-blooded, cold-blooded, and haughty as hell
Playboy by Constance Debré, translated by Holly James, is 5.2 x 8 x 0.5 inches & 176 pages.
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Reading Constance Debré’s Playboy—the first memoir in a triptych as slim and dangerously load-bearing as a martini stem—I thought a lot about being blue-blooded. Debré, as she points out repeatedly, is an aristocrat. The memoirs trace Debré’s launch out of one life as a married parent and a lawyer, and into another life, one strung together by a series of rapturous, tense affairs with various rapturous, tense women.
Debré writes a lot about the class dynamics of being an aristocrat with no money. I’m familiar with this literary character, though Debré is very un-Wharton, very un-James (I guess they’re Americans who seem kinda English, and Playboy is French, like très French). There’s zero beleaguered superiority. It’s haughty as hell, which is a recent through line in books I like. Debré’s attitude about class position is—as they say in France and in America—deeply sangfroid. Cold-blooded.
But the affairs in Playboy boil over. They’re hot-blooded. Debré writes with spare, direct precision and seems to think with this same precision too. There’s enoromous feeling but no extra words about it. It feels extreme. There’s no middle temperature. It’s an ice cube hurled into the fireplace to make a huge hiss. There’s another French word, I realize, to describe this collision of temperatures: blanch.
Anyway, I just bought Debré’s second installment, Love Me Tender, which was published first in the U.S. for reasons I don’t pretend to understand. The third, Name from MIT press, arrives in April 2025; can’t hardly wait.
Recently read Matrescence, didn’t you? I want to know everything you think. I wonder when that word won’t evoke spell check red squiggles underneath. 2027?
Listening to “Cool” by Gwen Stefani all the time because it’s a melancholy season and because I heard a moody cover of it in a gorgeous soap store.
Currently using Egyptian Geranium in my oil burner, which smells a bit like I’m trying so hard to be the most boutique boutique hotel. Something about the scent seems divisive, but I sense that I won’t hear the truth from any detractors who visit my house, so please write if you have strong opinions in either direction.
Woof wow I need to read this book now.
This is a great review of that book. Love Me Tender is also full of hot sex but also deeply depressing regarding the situation with her child. Did not realize there was a third one coming!