Constance Debré (b. 1972) comes from a famous family of the Parisian bourgeoisie; she is the granddaughter of Michel Debré, General de Gaulle's loyalist and Prime Minister, and the niece of several ministers of the Fifth Republic. Trained as a lawyer, she pursued a brilliant career, married and had a child before giving it all up, disgusted by a lifestyle and bourgeois values she abhorred.

She decides to become a writer, gives up her apartment, radically changes her look and style, and assumes her homosexuality more fully. She then begins a legal battle against her ex-husband, who can't stand her new life, to regain custody of her son, with whom relations are becoming increasingly complicated. It is as if the whole of society and the legal system as a whole were condemning the life choices and values of this woman in search of a stronger, more authentic adjustment with herself. This battle is lost in advance, and Constance Debré delivers an account of this abnegation, this material and almost spiritual self-stripping, but also of a failure of "normal" life and of her identity as a mother. 

Written in the very French tradition of autofiction, Love me tender (published in 2020) is also part of the literature of marginality which, from Jean Genet to Virginie Despentes, attempts to deconstruct social codes and invent new paths that are as aesthetic as they are about ethics. This poignant, vivid and hard-hitting novel won the Prix des Inrockuptibles.