Playboy
{{Playboy}}
Basic Info
- Author: Constance Debré'
- Year: 2024
- Type: #primary2
Summary (brief)
love Debré's short, sterile style of writing, which reflects her training as a lawyer. The very short episodic chapters make the book feel impossible to put down. Debré rejects traditional womanhood; gives up everything, sells everything, and changes her outward appearance to be more masculine. She describes how transforming her appearance and life may also be transforming her thoughts. She writes about sex and sexual relationships in a direct way - another subversion of expectations (where the man is the detached one and the woman is the emotional one in a sexual relationship). Debré describes herself as being simultaneously a girl and a boy sometimes, blurring the boundary between them. She writes about her boyishness as a child, and how her parents fully expected her to become a lesbian, but somewhere along the lines she "got over it," and writing as an adult now, she explains that she is returning to it, which is very compulsory heterosexual. I also like the way she interacts with other men in the novel, after her "transformation," where she feels herself to be more of an "equal," to them, and the way they respond accordingly to her. There are also some interesting themes about class and materialism. Debre wants truth and rejects vulnerability. She just states the facts without too much reflection and zero moralizing and almost no feelings about anything. Debré also participates in hating women with men. She also describes sex with women as a type of violence which is interesting.
Major Themes
- #hatingwomen
- #truthandmemory
- #storytelling
- #womanhood
- #gender
- #sex
- #sexuality
- #identity
- #truthandmemory
Key Passages / Quotes
Quote 1
quote:: “To love a woman, is to despise her. I understood the violence of men. I wondered if that's how they had always felt about us, if that's how Laurent had always felt about me.”
page:: 24
themes:: hating women, gender
Quote 3
quote:: “A woman's body is made to be touched and tasted, a woman is made to be fucked.”
page:: 56
themes:: hating women, gender, sexuality
Genre
#Autofiction Part of Autofiction trilogy: Playboy (2018), Love Me Tender (202), and Nom (2022).
#materialmemoir
Characters / Concepts (if relevant)
a French Lawyer (40-something Constance - author avatar) from aristocratic family who embraces queerness and transforms her life.
Her husband who turns their son against her (trying to leverage the illicit gay lit she reads to imply pedophilia and incest).
Agnes: married woman 15 years older than narrator
Ex huband: anchor to past life who is angry
The father: represents bourgeois family history
The model: 10 years younger than narrator
Theory Connections
Related Texts
My Argument / Interpretation
Dissertation Relevance
How could this matter to my project?
-Constance, like Nelson, is rewriting the maternal narrative