Love Me Tender by Constance Debré

When Constance told her ex-husband that she was dating women, he made a string of unfounded accusations that separated her from her young son, Paul. Laurent trained Paul to say he no longer wants to see his mother, and the judge believed him. She approaches this new life with passionate intensity and the desire for an unencumbered existence, certain that no love can last.

Apart from cigarettes, two regular lovers and women she has brief affairs with, Constance's approach is monastic and military - she swims daily, reads, writes, and returns to small or borrowed rooms for the night. A starkly beautiful account of impossible sacrifices asked from mothers, Love Me Tender is a bold novel of defiance, freedom and self-knowledge.
 
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'Committed to truth-telling, no matter how rough, but also intriguingly suspended in a cloud of unknowing and pain, Love Me Tender is a wry, original, agonizing book destined to become a classic of its kind.'--Maggie Nelson

'One of the most compulsive voices I've read in years ... there's undeniable pleasure to be had from the way in which she reacts, her powerful evacuation of feeling, her sense of taking an automatic rifle to her past... a vision of queer life that has nothing to do with identity or marriage or any of the new homonormative rites.'  - Olivia Laing