“She strips the French language back to its most crude and colloquial, subverts punctuation and deliberately goes against the current trend in French writing for plunging into psychological explanation.” The Guardian

Constance Debré ripped up the rule book when she began to write about life after she came out. A manifesto, ecstatic poem and political pamphlet, Name is the searing disavowal of identity and inheritance which completes her acclaimed trilogy.

Name affirms and extends Debré’s radical project. Newly single, and having recently come out as a lesbian, the narrator of Constance Debré’s first two novels Playboy and Love Me Tender embarked on a monastic regime of exercise, sex, and writing. By rejecting the notion of given identity, Constance Debré’s narrator approaches the heart of the radical emptiness that these earlier books were pursuing. Set partly in the narrator’s childhood, it rejects Proustian notions of ‘regaining’ the past. Instead, its narrator seeks to achieve true freedom; daring to accept the pain, loss, and violence of life. Translated into English by Lauren Elkin.

Constance Debré left her career as a lawyer to become a writer. Her other novels include Un peu là, beaucoup ailleurs (winner of the 2005 Prix Contrepoint), L’Offense, and Manuel pratique de l’idéal Abécédaire de survie.

In conversation with Una Mullally.

Presented in partnership with the French Embassy in Ireland.

Duration: 1 hour