Love Me Tender

“I see no reason why the love between mother and son should not be exactly the same as with any other love. So that you can't stop loving. Or break up at all.”

After 20 years of marriage, C. leaves her husband, starts dating women, quits a prestigious job as a lawyer to focus on writing books. The radical gesture of renouncing the normative family, reinforced by the rejection of bourgeois privilege, becomes a story of opposition to the patriarchal-capitalist order, for which, as in a Greek tragedy, the heroine brings the wrath of her husband and the system who try to deprive her of parental rights over her son.

Based on the book “Love Me Tender” by Constance Debré - one of the most important French representatives of self-fiction - the play is a story of the struggle for one's own desires, an account of the discovery and experience of queer sexuality, an attempt to describe oneself on its own terms. It is also a provocative question about the limits of freedom and the price that must be paid for it, about the right to self-determination, about social roles, as well as about femininity, motherhood and love - in many respects.

The novel translated by Jakub Polaszczyk will be published in Poland at the end of the year by Wydawnictwo Ha! Art.