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This autofiction tale about a mother who loses custody of her son and embraces a life of lesbian exploration severs the erotic from the romantic“My mother died today. Or maybe yesterday”: the famously deadpan opening of L’Étranger (The Outsider) by Albert Camus. Love Me Tender starts in a similarly affectless mode, with an even more shocking declaration: “I don’t see why the love between a mother and son should be different from other kinds of love. Why we shouldn’t be allowed to stop loving each other.” A son can lose interest in his mother, but for a mother to sever relations with her son is sacrilege.Except Constance (Love Me Tender is autofiction) has not abandoned her son, Paul, deliberately. Their relationship is a casualty of her sexuality. In her previous life, she was a Paris wife and mother, a lawyer, a good girl. When she left her 20-year marriage, a good-humoured joint custody was established. Single, Constance underwent a series of changes. She cut her hair, wore boys’ clothes, had “son of a bitch” tattooed across her stomach. She spent her days writing a novel and her nights chasing girls. But she was still a loving mother. At least, she was until she told her ex-husband, Laurent, that she was a lesbian and he responded by seizing custody of their eight-year-old son. Continue reading...