Because We Care

Danielle Chelosky reviews Constance Debré’s “Name,” translated by Lauren Elkin.

By Danielle CheloskyApril 30, 2025

• Memoir & Essay

TO SOMEONE LIKE Constance Debré, we’re still more trapped in tradition than we realize. Abolish families, the French writer suggests. Abolish childhood. Abolish names. Abolish anything that restrains. “If I were a terrorist, I would begin with the books,” writes Debré in Name, originally published in 2022 in France and now translated to English for Semiotext(e) by Lauren Elkin. “I would destroy them, I would tear them all up, I would burn them,” she imagines, launching into one of her many list-like excursions, calling books flabby, bourgeois, sluttish, cowardly.

Name is the final installment of the 53-year-old’s trilogy, following Playboy (published in France in 2018, the United States in 2024) and Love Me Tender (published in France in 2020, the US in 2022). The previous works navigate Debré’s journey of leaving her husband and her career as a lawyer behind to pursue writing and women, and the brutal legal battle for her son that ensued. Reflecting on the successful obliteration of her conventional living conditions, her prose in Name often possesses an ecstatic revolution reminiscent of Clarice Lispector’s 1973 masterpiece Água Viva. “Yes: I live and write against the obscenity of this miserable life,” Debré declares, beating the nihilism allegations. Her writing is far too full of mission statements and moments of gratitude to be dismissed as pessimistic, despite flirtations with misanthropy.

In this way, there’s not a better time for the publication of Name; the book should be shoved in the face of every pseudo-intellectual reactionary in the New York literary scene participating in the glorification of conservatism in response to the rise of liberalism over the past decade. Debré asserts that neither the Left nor the Right is happy, that we have to strive for something different altogether. Nostalgia for tradition is a misguided attempt for comfort when what we need is the opposite: “Walk into the void, that’s it, that’s what you have to do, get rid of everything, of everything you have, of everything you know, and go toward the unknown,” she advises cosmically, opening a portal with her words.

If Playboy subverted traditional ideas of gender and sexuality, and Love Me Tender the conventional bond between mothers and their sons, then Name pushes against Debré’s own status as a daughter in her family. But the ties between her and her lineage persist: similarities between her and her father peek through in both unsettling and beautiful ways, especially when it comes to her affinity for leaving—leaving lovers, leaving apartments. That restlessness is alive in the writing, in the way she says what she needs to say and immediately gets out, wasting no time.

Debré has mentioned her bourgeois background in her past books, mostly with disdain that leaves the reader wondering more. In Name, Debré offers an in-depth explanation. Her grandfather was Michel Debré, former prime minister of France; recalling her childhood, she cheekily recalls of him: “He’s writing his memoirs. I have never read them. Nobody cares.” Her father was a journalist, her mother a model. “In life it’s either beauty or power,” she contemplates, assigning her father’s side of the family power and beauty for her mother’s. She illustrates her mother’s beauty in viscerally Oedipal ways: “You hope that she will lower herself to your level. That she will lower herself and fuck you.” Her father’s three brothers were always competing for Prime Minister Daddy’s love; her mother’s three sisters all died after her mother. “In my mother’s family there’s a small collection of dead people who died young or violently,” Debré explains irreverently.

People are stuck in traditional structures of society, and Debré writes as a way of “spitting in their faces,” a gesture of care because “this miserable life is killing everyone.” Complacency is suicide; politeness is offensive. While this attitude could easily slip into the didactic, Debré’s sense of authority comes off as warranted as she pens this exposé of her high-profile family and shows how even the wealthy suffer from the system that benefits them. Addiction tears its way through Debré’s parents—opium, alcohol, heroin. Her mother died when Debré was 16, after which her father was in and out of recovery programs.

When her father died in 2020, Debré was tasked with taking care of the body; she recounts the process as if it were an everyday chore. Debré’s idiosyncratic philosophy involves a detached acceptance of death and a disinterest in mourning; if she grieves, it’s through the writing of this book, which could be perceived as an off-kilter elegy as much as an enlightened manifesto.

For Debré, writing should be an annihilation of conventions, an oasis for outsiders to question the norm and rebuild the world around us. She makes grand statements in an amusingly casual fashion, because they are not radical to her; they are simply logical. Throughout the book, she emphasizes this need to do what you have to and accept the consequences, and refuses to pretend her beliefs are a result of nonchalance: “Everything I do is because I care.” Leaving is a form of caring. Refusing to respect the dead is a form of caring. Despising modern literature is a form of caring.

Desire for destruction fills the pages of Name; even the book’s title itself is a dismantling of expectations, serving as an empty slate, the blankness Debré yearns for. Her admirable unabashedness could be summed up in her audacious fantasy of burning books within her own. Unafraid of hypocrisy, Debré would rather rile up than please; she prefers starting a fire to putting one out. Name indeed burns, threatening to destroy everything in its wake. But what comes after destruction is the exhilarating chance to start completely over.