You’re not allowed to compare people to Annie Ernaux anymore. It’s been overused to the point of meaningless at this point, her name thrown around in Orwell and Baldwin quantities. Not everyone French who writes in the general vicinity of their own experience is doing what Ernaux does in no small part because no-one does what she does. It’s also enormously reductive, making Louis and Schneck and Passeron and however many others sit in her divine shadow. And, and I apologise to whoever it was at the Irish Independent who made this innocent comparison, it certainly does not apply to Constance Debrè. Because Debrè comes to us from another time, when a life could be let with purpose and honesty without being suffocated under a landfill of superfluous garbage we find it impossible to resist. She’s a radical, that species thought lost to the earth, turned in in exchange for complacency and stultifying safety. If there is a comparison to be made, and the unwritten laws of the review apparently demand it, it’s with Simone Weil, Margery Kempe, Christina the Astonishing (a name I have long wanted to crowbar into a review, I must admit). She’s a mystic, barely of this earth. The book itself: it’s raw alcohol, set aflame. The story of how she came to reject everything; possessions, comfort, stability, family, her name; and lived radically free from all of it. Of how she watched her father die, disintegrated by the years of obligation and hypocrisy. Of seeing her sister weep for that death, and feel utterly alien from her traditional life. It sounds cruel and nihilistic, but the reading is exhilarating, a shot of adrenaline to the heart. I found her previous, ‘Love Me Tender’, a little grating by the end but she’s a beacon here, a being of terrifying clarity and purpose. I could not do what she has done; I suspect meeting her on the train would be enough to put me in the hospital. She knows we are deaf to what she can hear with such otherworldly clarity; that’s her purpose. The beauty of her is that she could not care less.