Absence Makes the Heart
CONSTANCE DEBRÉ’S autobiographical novel Playboy is the story of a metamorphosis. We meet the narrator just after she has left her husband, Laurent, and started dating and having sex with women. She had been with Laurent for fifteen years. They were both bored the entire time. The boredom was “a solid foundation,” “a bomb shelter.”
The essence of couple life is being bored shitless. Couple life and life in general. In that sense, we were compatible, Laurent and I. . . . We were both the same height, we wore the same clothes, we were both as bored as each other. . . . What we liked