Philippe Besson

The award-winning, bestselling French novel by Philippe Besson—“the French Brokeback Mountain” (Elle)—about an affair between two teenage boys in 1984 France, translated with subtle beauty and haunting lyricism by the iconic and internationally acclaimed actress/writer Molly Ringwald. We drive at high speed along back roads, through woods, vineyards, and oat fields. The bike smells like gasoline and makes a lot of noise, and sometimes I’m frightened when the wheels slip on the gravel on the dirt road, but the only thing that matters is that I’m holding on to him, that I’m holding on to him outside. Just outside a hotel in Bordeaux, Philippe chances upon a young man who bears a striking resemblance to his first love. What follows is a look back at the relationship he’s never forgotten, a hidden affair with a gorgeous boy named Thomas during their last year of high school. Without ever acknowledging they know each other in the halls, they steal time to meet in secret, carrying on a passionate, world-altering affair. Dazzlingly rendered in English by Ringwald in her first-ever translation, Besson’s powerfully moving coming-of-age story captures the eroticism and tenderness of first love—and the heartbreaking passage of time.

A Novel

Lie With Me

Essence

— you have your life waiting for you, and I will never change. I just wanted to write to tell you that I have been happy during these months together, that I have never been so happy. and that I already know I will never be so happy again.

…death is only a matter between you and yourself

I don't know then that one day I won't be seventeen. I don't know that youth doesn't last, that it's only a moment, and then it disappears and by the time you finally realize it, it's too late. It's finished, vanished, lost.

Leonard Gorges

I wonder if it’s cold fathers who make sensitive sons

Linus Rogge

Have you noticed how the most beautiful landscapes lose their brilliance as soon as our thoughts prevent us from seeing them properly?

I had the time to think all the way home about how affairs of the body are so much more preferable to affairs of the heart, but that sometimes you don't have the choice.

(And when you've been hurt once, you're afraid to try again later, in dread of enduring the same pain. You avoid getting hurt in an attempt to avoid suffering: for years, this principle will serve as my holy sacrament. So many lost years.)

There is the insanity of not being able to be seen together. An insanity that is aggravated in this case by the unprecedented situation of finding ourselves in the middle of a crowd and having to act like strangers. It seems crazy not to be able to show our happiness. Such an impoverished word. Others have this right, and they exercise it freely. Sharing their happiness makes them even more happy, makes them expand with joy. But we're left stunted, compromised, by the burden of having to always lie and censor ourselves.

Nothing touches me more than cracks in the armor and the person who reveals them.

But I will never change. I will never think: It's bad, or It would be better to be like everyone else, or I will lie to them so that they'll accept me. Never. I stick to who I am. In silence, of course, but it's a proud, stubborn silence.

Srijita Sarkar 

In the end, death is only a matter between you and yourself?

You can never really let go of your childhood. Especially when it was happy.

It’s a curious notion, love; difficult to identify and define

The truth, the brutal truth, was that I was in love. Enough to use the right word.

The clandestine meetings resume as before. Kisses on the body. Love in my bedroom. Everything in this room that belongs only to us. Everything that is incommunicable to the rest of the world.

I had the time to think all the way home about how affairs of the body are so much more preferable to affairs of the heart, but that sometimes you don’t have the choice.

I cannot stand the idea that he could be taken from me. That I could lose him. I discover for the first time—poor idiot—this stabbing pain of love.

The pain must disfigure me, adding a mixture of spite and sadness to my expression.

He says that for him Spain is just people in his family who love one another, who eat and drink and cut each other off in conversation until night falls.

And the feeling of never quite belonging, of being a person uprooted, as if, maybe, who knows, a sense of not belonging is something one inherits.

I begin to wonder if he chose me only because I was available, because I was the ideal vehicle through which to fulfill his repressed desires, because he hadn’t yet found others like me. I will repeat to myself: I am for him a boy he fucks, nothing more. I’m reduced to a body, a penis, a function.

He sees me in a certain way, a way he will never deviate from. In the end, love was only possible because he saw me not as who I was, but as the person I would become.

“It suits everyone to believe in an accident. It’s less embarrassing than a suicide.”

I wonder if my grandmother could have committed suicide. I don’t know. I like to believe that she did it, as it would have been the sole act of freedom in her entire existence

It’s also the first time I’ve smiled at him. He smiles back at me. It seems as intimate to me, as magnetic, as skin against skin.

He smiles back at me and I receive his smile like a gift. There weren’t many times Thomas smiled at me like that. It wasn’t his way.

i'm genuinely so speechless, i don't know what to say... besson's storytelling is wonderfully elegiac and horribly heart-breaking. i found myself hoping that things would turn out, despite knowing exactly how it would end. the descriptions and usage of memory and retelling were also so wonderfully melancholic and impactful. i've never been so emotional reading something before.

Ghofran Mustafa 

Later I will write about this longing,
the intolerable deprivation of the other.
I will write about the sadness that eats away at you, making you crazy.

i cried

Reread:
Why did i do this to myself

"And when you've been hurt once, you're afraid to try again later, in dread of enduring the same pain. You avoid getting hurt in an attempt to avoid suffering: for years, this principle will serve as my holy sacrament. So many lost years."

"The clandestine meetings resume as before. Kisses on the body. Love in my bedroom. Everything in this room that belongs only to us. Everything that is incommunicable to the rest of the world."

"I know that Thomas consented to this single picture only because he knew (had decided) that it was our last moment together. He smiled so that I could take his smile with me." 

"Except that I miss Thomas. I miss him terribly. And that changes everything. Have you noticed how the most beautiful landscapes lose their brilliance as soon as our thoughts prevent us from seeing them properly?"

"Of course, it took time, a lot of time, before I admitted that everything was lost, before I decided to say goodbye forever. I kept hoping for a sign. I thought of initiating another meeting. I started letters that I never sent. Desire does not go out like a match, it extinguishes slowly as it burns into ash. In the end I gave up on all possibilities of a reunion." 

I think this book struck me very, very hard in many different ways. The desperation, the longing, the yearning. So much of it is relatable, not just because of the forbidden aspect of the relationship between the narrator and Thomas, but because these are the feelings of a first love. My first love was a more intense love than I've felt since. At one point in the story, the narrator goes to describe losing his mother as a child at a fair, and the absolute terror and loneliness that came with that. He relates this back to how he felt fearing he would never see Thomas again. Once I read that piece, I had to put the book down for a moment and close my eyes, recounting all the times I felt like that in my teen years with the boy I loved. That piece has embedded itself into my brain and become one of my favorite things I've read all year solely due to the relatability of it. Love is pathetic, embarrassing, and humiliating. Besson describes these feelings in a way that also makes them beautiful, a way that will have you recounting your own first loves and former experiences with relationships. The ending is devastating, yet still so romantic. Despite Thomas' death, despite all the years put between the narrator and him, the narrator feels so much love for him still. He writes about their short time together with fondness, love, and nostalgia. I can only begin to hope to have even a fraction of these feelings to share with someone. Beautiful story, I'm upset I put this on hold for so long.

sarah ˚ʚ♡ɞ˚

"And when you've been hurt once, you're afraid to try again later, in dread of enduring the same pain. You avoid getting hurt in an attempt to avoid suffering: for years, this principle will serve as my holy sacrament. So many lost years."

"The clandestine meetings resume as before. Kisses on the body. Love in my bedroom. Everything in this room that belongs only to us. Everything that is incommunicable to the rest of the world."

"I know that Thomas consented to this single picture only because he knew (had decided) that it was our last moment together. He smiled so that I could take his smile with me." 

"Except that I miss Thomas. I miss him terribly. And that changes everything. Have you noticed how the most beautiful landscapes lose their brilliance as soon as our thoughts prevent us from seeing them properly?"

"Of course, it took time, a lot of time, before I admitted that everything was lost, before I decided to say goodbye forever. I kept hoping for a sign. I thought of initiating another meeting. I started letters that I never sent. Desire does not go out like a match, it extinguishes slowly as it burns into ash. In the end I gave up on all possibilities of a reunion." 

I think this book struck me very, very hard in many different ways. The desperation, the longing, the yearning. So much of it is relatable, not just because of the forbidden aspect of the relationship between the narrator and Thomas, but because these are the feelings of a first love. My first love was a more intense love than I've felt since. At one point in the story, the narrator goes to describe losing his mother as a child at a fair, and the absolute terror and loneliness that came with that. He relates this back to how he felt fearing he would never see Thomas again. Once I read that piece, I had to put the book down for a moment and close my eyes, recounting all the times I felt like that in my teen years with the boy I loved. That piece has embedded itself into my brain and become one of my favorite things I've read all year solely due to the relatability of it. Love is pathetic, embarrassing, and humiliating. Besson describes these feelings in a way that also makes them beautiful, a way that will have you recounting your own first loves and former experiences with relationships. The ending is devastating, yet still so romantic. Despite Thomas' death, despite all the years put between the narrator and him, the narrator feels so much love for him still. He writes about their short time together with fondness, love, and nostalgia. I can only begin to hope to have even a fraction of these feelings to share with someone. Beautiful story, I'm upset I put this on hold for so long.

The Advocate’s Best Gay Novel of 2019 A New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice O, The Oprah Magazine’s Best LGBTQ Books That'll Change the Literary Landscape in 2019 The Wall Street Journal’s Ten Books You’ll Want to Read this Spring Out's Best Queer Books of April 2019 TheSkimm’s LGBTQ+ books to celebrate Pride “Stunning and heart-gripping.” —André Aciman, author of Call Me By Your Name The award-winning, bestselling French novel by Philippe Besson—“the French Brokeback Mountain” (Elle)—about an affair between two teenage boys in 1984 France, translated with subtle beauty and haunting lyricism by the iconic and internationally acclaimed actress/writer Molly Ringwald. We drive at high speed along back roads, through woods, vineyards, and oat fields. The bike smells like gasoline and makes a lot of noise, and sometimes I’m frightened when the wheels slip on the gravel on the dirt road, but the only thing that matters is that I’m holding on to him, that I’m holding on to him outside. Just outside a hotel in Bordeaux, Philippe chances upon a young man who bears a striking resemblance to his first love. What follows is a look back at the relationship he’s never forgotten, a hidden affair with a gorgeous boy named Thomas during their last year of high school. Without ever acknowledging they know each other in the halls, they steal time to meet in secret, carrying on a passionate, world-altering affair. Dazzlingly rendered in English by Ringwald in her first-ever translation, Besson’s powerfully moving coming-of-age story captures the eroticism and tenderness of first love—and the heartbreaking passage of time.

Yochanan Vered 

Very well written. The beautiful writing truly made me feel the emotions of the narrator’s reminiscing of his first love and adolescence in general. I like that the majority of the book was told in the past tense, simply a man looking back on a part of his life that was important. The final third felt a little unexpected to me. Usually books like this stay in the past, but here we got to see the aftermath of lives lived. This was really good, and the final lines hit hard

Finished in a day. Rarely does a book choke me up. Beautiful. 

Jeff Dlouhy

I seriously have no words for this. No summary, no explanation will ever come close to reading, and feeling what this story portrays in such simple and thoughtful manner. 

De passage dans sa région natale, le narrateur, qui n'est autre que Philippe Besson, aperçoit au détour d'une rue une silhouette, un visage, dont la ressemblance avec son premier amour le frappe tel un coup de poignard. S'ensuit le récit de la rencontre, vingt-cinq ans plus tôt, entre deux adolescents que tout oppose : l'un, plutôt timide, est fils d'instituteur, élève studieux et lecteur chevronné ; l'autre est enfant de paysans, rebelle, charismatique et mystérieux, coqueluche des filles du lycée. Leur attirance est immédiate, sans équivoque. Leurs étreintes clandestines se déroulent dans un émerveillement teinté de culpabilité et de déni. Le secret qui les entoure n'en accentue que davantage l'intensité. Mais Thomas se montre incapable d'exprimer ses sentiments, d'accepter ce qu'il est. Il disparaît de la vie du narrateur aussi soudainement qu'il y était entré, laissant au jeune Philippe la blessure d'un premier amour au goût d'inachevé. Lorsque ce récit prend fin, des années après, l'auteur apprend avec une infinie tristesse que le Thomas si lumineux de sa jeunesse a passé sa vie à tenter de contrecarrer sa nature, à la dissimuler aux yeux de tous, précipitant ainsi sa fin tragique. Première incursion de Philippe Besson dans l'autofiction, " Arrête avec tes mensonges " souligne, à commencer par son titre, à quel point le choix de la vérité relève parfois de l'héroïsme. A l'âge des possibles, deux destins s'ébauchent inéluctablement sous nos yeux : celui d'un jeune homme sur le point de nier l'évidence, de basculer à vie dans le mensonge, et celui d'un autre qui deviendra romancier, bâtisseur de fictions, conteur d'histoires. Le récit de leurs amours dresse un constat terrible et poignant, exempt de tout jugement moral, sur la difficulté d'être soi dans certains contextes sociaux ou familiaux. Philippe Besson y raconte aussi la découverte salvatrice des écrivains qui n'ont cessé depuis de nourrir son inspiration, fidèles compagnons de route tels que Marguerite Duras ou Hervé Guibert, dont les livres lui tiennent encore lieu de remparts contre l'intolérance, la bêtise et le mal de vivre.

roman

Arrête avec tes mensonges

Noah

Lu en trois jours, un chapitre par période de temps, une période de temps pour une ellipse. Je pense que ça m’a permis d’être à peu près en accord avec la nostalgie et l’empreinte du souvenir qui marque chaque chapitre. Je pense que j’ai facilement connecté avec la façon dont il écrit, il y avait quelque chose de moi dans la structure de ses mots. J’ai pu associer des films et chansons et couleurs à chaque instants, les marquant pour toujours —-99luftballons, L’homme blessé, Cyril Collard, Days of Candy, Duras…

C’est un livre très proche de mon cœur, je le sais déjà.

Oui. Un jour cela arrivera, un jour il vous viendra le regret abominable de cela que vous qualifiez « d'invivable », c'est-à-dire de ce qui a été tenté par vous et moi pendant cet été 80 de pluie et de vent. Quelquefois c'est au bord de la mer. Quand la plage se vide, à la tombée de la nuit. Après le départ des colonies d'enfants. Sur toute l'étendue des sables tout à coup, ça hurle que Capri c'est fini. Que C'ÉTAIT LA VILLE DE NOTRE PREMIER AMOUR mais que maintenant c'est fini. FINI. Que c'est terrible tout à coup. Terrible. Chaque fois à pleurer, à fuir, à mourir parce que Capri a tourné avec la Terre, vers l'oubli de l'amour. Duras

this book literally devastated meee. this book tolerated my "what ifs" in life 

drix

𓆨

Dani

I was torn between reading this in English or its original French — I regret my choice somewhat: I could feel that his prose probably made more sense in French, particularly in terms of its pacing. I appreciate the introspection, the glimpses we get into the main characters childhood, but I was a bit confused by how far this aspect of it was pushed, to the point of blending flashbacks with an almost stream of consciousness style. I’m not sure that helped move the story forward, or acquire a better understanding of the main characters current state of mind aside from the melancholy he carries. Important episodes of his life were hinted at but left unexplained, I wish we could have gotten further insight into this side of him. 

All in all, if you’re looking for an emotional read, it does tick all the boxes. It will tug at your heart. However, I don’t think one can rate a book as emotional as this so easily, it’s a bit like trying to water down the message it is trying to convey. It was a beautiful, heart wrenching story, told in such a tender way. I do not have any criticism in that regard. 

This review will be revisited once I get my hands on a French copy. 

3.5⭐️⭐️⭐️✨

Saffy

this feeling of love, it transports me, it makes me happy. at the same time, it consumes me and makes me miserable, the way all impossible lives are miserable.

Batur

Lie with is the kind of book where you’ll find yourself at 4am crying on the floor. It’s heart gripping. It destroyed me and I will never recover from that letter in the last page.

Uel Immer Aberia

Roderick Pitts

"nothing touches me more than cracks in the armor and the person who reveals them."

"desire does not go out like a match, it extinguishes slowly as it burns into ash."

"you get used to everything, even the defection of those you thought you were bound to forever."

Beautiful prose that really grips at your heart and tears it apart. One of desire, struggle and the acceptance of non closure 

Samwinder

lexie

Ziggy

I felt my eyes start watering around 65 pages in and that burning didn’t stop until the water broke. It’s heartbreaking and earnest and ‘tender’ beyond belief. A novel I will think about for so long to come.

Lie With Me A Novel

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