I love this book so much. It's engrossing, gripping, compelling, and fascinating. Debre is writing herself into the queer literary tradition of de Sade, Genet, Guibert (hadn't heard of him before but subsequently read 'To the friend who didn't save my life' and was staggered by it). She's anti-family, anti-marriage. She's a butch lesbian, dispossessing herself of all physical and emotional needs which is reflected in the way the French court system is tearing her to pieces. It's a book about an injustice that details the custody battle between the narrator, CD, and her soon-to-be ex-husband over their young son, Paul. But it's also asking the question: can a woman be a mother and an artist? Debre is creating a character for an interesting 'roman faux' , and although I have no doubt that she loves her son desperately, she is doing everything the way a man would do it: leaving the family home, having habitually meaningless sex with dozens of girls, who she derides for wanting a domestic life - a weakness in her eyes. She's almost rejecting being a woman in order to be an artist. Laurent, her husband, has been granted sole custody because he accused her of incest and paedophilia based on her homosexuality, the people she hangs out with, and the books she reads and writes. Seems insane but remember, France is a very misogynistic country. It's the home of the Napoleonic Code that rendered women 'eternal minors', where intellectual, freethinking women were diagnosed as mad and in the nineteenth century - the heyday of the asylum - the careers of lots of men like
Dr Phillippe Pinel, the founder of Psychiatry in France and Dr Jean-Martin Charcot were
made in institutions for the insane which housed mostly women. So, yes, CD is in the fight of her life and not even for custody, just for the right to see her son and have him stay every other weekend. A powerful piece of writing.