Motherhood and freedom

Love me tender (2025) is a film that can be seen on Filmin and which has adapted the autobiographical novel by French author Constance Debré. This book was a phenomenon in France in 2020 and the film director Anna Cazenave read it just when she had become a mother. As she herself explained, knowing the story of a woman who does not allow motherhood to erase her other identities comforted her greatly and led her to adapt the story for the cinema.

Constance Debré –who belonged to a family of prominent French politicians– was forty years old when she decided to put aside her career as a lawyer to be a writer and, at the same time, come out of the closet. Her ex-husband argued before a judge that Constance's lifestyle was unsuitable for a child and won custody of the son they had in common.

Knowing the story of Love me tender and knowing that it was a true story unsettled me and made me think about the novel Small Pleasures that I read a few months ago. It explains the case of a girl, Dawn, married very young and with a small daughter, who falls in love with a girl, Hazel, and confesses it to her husband. The husband, angry and advised by the most bigoted in his circle, takes Dawn to court and demands absolute custody of the girl. He gets it. Afterwards, he erases the maternal figure from this girl's life. As you can see, two very connected stories, only the one in Small Pleasures is set in 1982 in England. The author, Claire Lynch, clarifies in a note at the end of the novel that in the eighties, in the United Kingdom, around 90% of lesbian mothers who divorced lost legal custody of their children. The Thatcher government and the AIDS epidemic were decisive in creating a climate of homophobia like the one described in the novel.

I remember the impression this discovery made on me. Now, the film about Constance Debré reveals to me that in the year 2020, in France, very similar things could happen.

If you like Love me tender I recommend you read Small Pleasures, in which, thanks to literature, we can imagine what consequences a case like this can have on a small child. Claire Lynch, moreover, writes very well, creating precise, original but not convoluted metaphors, at the service of the story she narrates.

Small Pleasures has been published by Edicions del Periscopi, with a translation by Núria Saurina.