Pussyboy — Patrick Autréaux
Extract @ Socrates On the Beach
« Knowing what he is doing, measured by the reliability of my reaction, he is almost childlike when he lifts his eyes toward me. A breast and its milk, a penis and that other milk. He and I, taking turns, switch roles in movements that inhale and suck. The first gestures of life, of survival. Organs are confused, they lose their reproductive function becoming nothing more than totems, symbols, undifferentiated teats, cock or breast. But this lack of distinction comes to contaminate we who enact it: he loses in virility what I gain when I’m with him in the feminine. We advance, one toward the other, by a softening of that which distinguishes the roles we have been attributed. In the mounting excitement, our places do not, perhaps, change, but their designation becomes more imprecise. Between he and I, it is not a game of in-and-out for a cock-breast in an orifice, but rather the coming and going of sensations and emotions that we refuse to clarify. »
An extract from Patrick Autréaux’s novel Pussyboy is now out with Socrates On the Beach.
The novel, based on autobiographical experience, depicts an inner metamorphosis that occurs through a sexual relationship between two men, one of Muslim descent.
Of it, Edmund White wrote: “This book is as honest as it is imaginative — at last a sex memoir that explores religion, the history of painting, history itself! — and that finds in sex the connective tissue of all our experience.”
Patrick Autréaux is a French writer, living between Paris and Cambridge (USA). The view of illness as an inner experience informs his first cycle of writing, ending with Se survivre (Verdier). He is the author of dozens of books and articles in French. His new novel, L’Epoux has just been published by Gallimard.
I loved our interactions on X, dude, and many thanks for the post-card bits across a year or so ago - I always love seeing your Paris sky-line rooftop shots showing up on my X-feed of the Parisian roofs - was wondering, I've added the French-edition to my Goodreads of Patrick's novel, I don't suppose your're translating the whole thing, are you as a second-language my Vietnamese is better than my French :)
Thought I'd just note: I, gratefully, stumbled upon your Substack through a 3:AM article that Patrick posted - https://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/from-the-other-side/ - which references Bảo Ninh's The Sorrow of War that I've just read (am going through a Vietnamese phase right now, currently reading Linh Dinh's Psychotic Vehemence Seen from Afar having gone down a rabbit-hole from his Night, Again: Contemporary Fiction from Vietnam).
Cheers.