Lie With Me by Philippe Besson

JetBlackDragonfly
Apr 5
2 min read

Updated: Apr 7

This award-winning novel was a bestseller in France under the title Arrete Avec Tes Mensonges (Stop With Your Lies).

Subtle and haunting, this conveys the yearning and loss of hearts branded by young love.

The author (we can call him Philippe) is being interviewed in a hotel lobby for his latest novel, when he sees across the room a young man exiting. The way he carries his suitcase, the casual way he is dressed, brings to mind someone he once knew. "Thomas!" he shouts as he runs after the boy, feeling he will know exactly what his face will look like.

Lucas is indeed the son of Thomas.

Philippe was in school in the mid-eighties of acid wash jeans and wool leggings, Rumble Fish and 99 Luftballons, not knowing that being seventeen only lasts a moment. Thomas Andrieu was a shaggy-haired boy with a hint of a beard, slender and distant, a year older at eighteen. Philippe felt a stranger to Thomas, reluctant to let him know he is interested in him, until one day after break, Thomas invites him to lunch in town. Philippe knew he preferred boys but was not yet ready to say it. Instead, he asks "Why me?" and Thomas admits "I don't see anyone but you and you don't even realize it."

They discover the world of each other for the first time, secretly meeting, the insanity of not being seen together. Philippe did not realize he would one day write books and they would be formed by these experiences (in one book the hero is named Thomas Andrieu). At the end of the year, Philippe leaves for Ile de Re with his family, and Thomas leaves for Spain, never to return. Twenty-three years later, Philippe meets Lucas at the hotel and discovers the life Thomas led after they parted, recalling the stabbing pain of love.

Memorable and tender, this seems autobiographical. The author states his new novel is the story of inseparable friends who become separated, and interrupts the story to comment as he remembers. However, he mentions several times that his work is fictional, and he loves inventing scenarios about people. So closely are the two woven together, I wonder if it is indeed fact or fiction.

For a novel of discovering first love, and how your entire life is shaped by those events, this slender novel is exceptional - a compliment also for the English translator, actress and writer Molly Ringwald.

Philippe Besson has written 23 novels, several adapted for the screen, including Lie With Me in 2022.

2017 / Hardcover / 150 pages