Constance Debré, born in 1972, is a French lawyer and novelist.

Constance Debré
Constance Debré in 2022.
Born1972
NationalityFrench
OccupationNovelist

Biography

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Constance Debré's parents were journalist François Debré (1942–2020) and former model Maylis Ybarnégaray (1942–1988); the judge and politician Jean-Louis Debré is her uncle. Her grandparents included Michel Debré (1912–1996), former Prime Minister under General de Gaulle, and Jean Ybarnégaray (1883–1956), a minister of the Vichy regime and resistance fighter.

She was 16 when her mother died. She studied at Lycée Henri-IV, then law at Panthéon-Assas University. She is also a graduate of class 99 (E99) of the ESSEC Business School.[1] She married in 1993 and had a son in 2008.[2]

Working as a defence lawyer, she accompanied her father in 2011 when he was charged in an inquiry into fictitious jobs at the town hall of Paris. In 2013, she was elected second secretary of the Conference of Lawyers of the Paris Bar.[3]

In 2015, she left her husband and her job to live with a woman and pursue a full-time career as a writer. In 2018, she won the Prix La Coupole [fr] for her autobiographical novel Play Boy, which describes the aftermath of this fateful decision: the custody battle over her son, and its associated pressures to conform to a "bourgeois" family model with a same-sex partner. It formed the first book in a trilogy.[4]

Books

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  • Un peu là, beaucoup ailleurs, Monaco-Paris, France, Le Rocher, 2004, ISBN 2-268-05191-9, Prix Contrepoint, 2005
  • Manuel pratique de l'idéal. Abécédaire de survie, Monaco-Paris, France, Le Rocher, 2007, ISBN 978-2-268-06130-6
  • Play Boy, Paris, Éditions Stock, 2018, ISBN 978-2-234-08429-2
  • Love me tender, Paris, Éditions Flammarion, 2020, ISBN 978-2-08-147173-3
  • Nom, Paris, Éditions Flammarion, 2022, ISBN 978-2-08-151593-2
  • Offenses, Paris, Éditions Flammarion, 2023, ISBN 978-2-08-028614-7

References

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  1. ^ Armengaud Wurmser, Louis (17 September 2018). "Livre : Play boy | ESSEC alumni". essecalumni.com.
  2. ^ Vaillant, Luc Le (9 January 2018). "Constance Debré, maître ès femmes". Libération (in French).
  3. ^ Dhellemmes, Gaspard (14 September 2020). "Constance Debré, la prometteuse avocate métamorphosée par la littérature". Vanity Fair.
  4. ^ Chrisafis, Angelique (14 January 2023). "'Family is the place for madness': Constance Debré on the book that has shocked France". The Guardian. London.
  5. ^ Nevins, Jake (2024-04-09). "Constance Debré Started Sleeping With Women. Then She Wrote Four Books". Interview Magazine. Retrieved 2024-04-24.
  6. ^ Tennant-Moore, Hannah (2024-04-07). "A Frenchwoman's Midlife Sexual Awakening". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 2024-04-24.
  7. ^ Nersessian, Anahid (2024-05-09). "Wanting for Nothing". The New York Review of Books. Vol. 71, no. 8. ISSN 0028-7504. Retrieved 2024-04-24.
  8. ^ Chrisafis, Angelique (2023-01-14). "'Family is the place for madness': Constance Debré on the book that has shocked France". The Guardian. ISSN 0261-3077. Retrieved 2024-04-24.
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