ARTS

Lie With Me

a little novel with a life of its own

After Philippe Besson finished his 2017 novel Lie With Me, he thought he would never be able to write again. This is understandable; the work is so climactic and personal. Somehow, he’s stuffed all of the volatile feelings associated with young love and heartbreak into 150 pages, weaving personal narrative, description, and reflection into somewhat of a fever dream. For any hopeless romantic, his words ring true. What stands out in Besson’s words are the humanity and essential truths they hold. Besson tells a story that everyone can relate to—a story of the magnitude of young love and the emptiness of inevitable, ensuing heartbreak.

Readers are never told that it’s an accurate retelling, though the parallels between Besson and the narrator’s life are uncanny. The main character, also named Philippe, has strikingly similar characteristics to Besson. And it’s set in the small French town of Barbezieux, based on the town that Besson grew up in—Barbezieux-Saint-Hilaire. Though Besson explicitly says that he only writes fiction, readers of Lie With Me must constantly ask themselves if what Besson writes about actually happened. The first-person narrative, told from Philippe’s perspective, skips back and forth through time, alternating between middle age reflection and a 17-year-old’s point of view. Is it autofiction? Playful memoir? Lie With Me intentionally brings out these questions to offer a third way to think about events of the past—not as accurate or inaccurate, but rather as dissected and re-examined. Besson himself is a well-known and prolific French writer. At 54, he’s written almost twenty novels in eighteen years, several of which were adopted for film. Lie With Me, translated by actress and author Molly Ringwald in 2019 for American audiences, is currently being made into a film. Besson’s work isn’t excessively lyrical and detailed; its beauty is that it doesn’t waste time. Besson uses spare sentences that beautifully sum up milestones. It’s a book you can finish in one sitting, and it knocks the wind out of you.

Besson supposedly wrote the novel after a life-changing meeting at a café in Paris in 2016 where he received a letter from a person in his past (further details of which would spoil the plot). This encounter causes him to reflect on an early love affair. From the beginning of the novel, Thomas Andrieu—the subject of Philippe’s adoration—is somewhat of a mystery. Philippe does what anyone with a distant crush in high school would. He fantasizes and longs, repeating Thomas’ name to himself in secret, and writing it on scraps of paper. He convinces himself that Thomas isn’t interested in boys, and so he chalks up his dreams to a strong one-way desire. But one day, to Philippe’s amazement, Thomas approaches him and asks him to lunch.

Thus commences their short-lived romance. The two could not be more different, which makes it all the more intoxicating for both of them. Philippe describes himself as studious, feminine, and a bit awkward, while Thomas is somber, quiet, and handsome. Philippe’s father is a headmaster at a primary school while Thomas’ mother is a Spanish migrant worker, who helps run their family dairy farm. Besson provides nuanced commentary on the class divide; Philippe has aspirations to be a writer, but Thomas feels he doesn’t have another option than to work on the farm for the rest of his life.

In their mid-80s small community, homophobia is inflamed by the ongoing AIDS epidemic and French nationalist efforts to promote the idea that the gay community threatens the entire population. On their first date, Thomas tells Philippe that he can no longer be alone with the feeling of loving him, but that if they are to see each other, no one can know. So, they lie and censor their emotions in public, escaping to cloakrooms and sheds to make love. Philippe is bullied at school for never having a girlfriend. His classmates spread rumors and call him slurs. He is known as being bad at sports, off-beat, different.

There is only one moment in the book where the boys reveal themselves in public: when Thomas gives Philippe a motorcycle ride through the scenic vineyards and oat fields surrounding their town. Though Philippe is scared, he says the only thing that matters is “that he’s holding onto him, and holding onto him outside.” As an openly gay writer, Besson fills the novel with questions of suppression of sexuality. Philippe asks himself when and how it began for Thomas and how Thomas can keep it so undetectable. He wonders if he is the first man Thomas has been with, and if he will be the last. And from very early on in the romance, he asks himself whether Thomas’ outward suppression of his sexuality causes internal suffering.

Today, gay literature is more celebrated and accessible, but it has taken a long time to get here, and it still has a long way to go. Modern scholars have picked out themes of homosexual love in ancient texts, such as Homer’s Iliad, Plato’s Symposium, and Virgil’s Eclogues. In the 18th and 19th centuries, subtextual ways of writing about homosexuality were often adopted, disguised as vampire tales and philosophical fiction. But it wasn’t until the 20th century, as attitudes shifted, that literature around the world began to more explicitly discuss themes of homosexuality. Pier Paolo Pasolini, Jean Genet, Allen Ginsberg, Frank O’Hara, Gore Vidal, and Tennessee Williams were all pioneers of this genre, writing about sexuality in ways that had never been done before.

Following Stonewall and through the AIDS crisis, literature became an avenue for gay authors, artists, and readers to find hope. As representations of people living with AIDS spread across the media, there was an abundance of visual and literary art. These works have a sense of urgency that distinguishes them from the rest of the literary canon––they raise consciousness about medical emergencies, the trauma of early death, socially oppressed groups, and more. Like Lie With Me, they often carry a sense of secrecy and stigma, fed by a society that suppressed and condemned the LGBTQ+ community. For readers, an illegal and clandestine romance such as Philippe’s feels exciting—the forbiddenness makes it more enticing.

British writer Alan Hollingsworth, who became a well-known voice in contemporary gay fiction after his publication of The Swimming-Pool Library in 1988, spoke to The Guardian recently about how he thinks the contemporary gay novel is “dead.” For Hollingsworth, the political purpose and novelty of gay writing has lessened. “I can see that I keep going back to the periods when things were more difficult and clandestine, because they seem from a fictional point of view to be more rewarding,” he said. This is what Besson does, too, harkening back to a time when Philippe and Thomas were forced to express themselves covertly.

Hollingsworth isn’t entirely wrong that these stories held more urgency during the 20th century, but what he misses is the large future for contemporary queer readers and writers. Though now there is a more outward sense of pride from the LGBTQ+ community, a great sense of loneliness remains. In his article The Epidemic of Gay Loneliness, Michael Hobbes recognizes this tangible progress, but points out the reality of the modern gay experience: “Still, even as we celebrate the scale and speed of this change, the rates of depression, loneliness and substance abuse in the gay community remain stuck in the same place they’ve been for decades.” While Besson’s novel examines what it’s like to be socially unaccepted, modern gay novels are beginning to examine what it’s like to find a sense of belonging within societies that are opening their doors for the first time.

Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life, Rita Brown’s Rubyfruit Jungle: A Novel, Alexander Chee’s Edinburgh, and Garth Greenwell’s What Belongs to You all examine these issues, describing the experiences of a more economically, racially, and age-diverse queer community. Ultimately, the future of gay literature perhaps lies in what these works accomplish—telling the stories of a wider range of people dealing with feelings of loneliness and emotional trauma. Can contemporary authors redefine the way we label what we read, allowing readers to identify characters independently of who they chose to have sex with? Or, perhaps the ultimate goal for this category is to move toward a more apolitical canon, appreciated as literature, not just queer literature.

“Besson tells a story that everyone can relate to—a story of the magnitude of young love and the emptiness of inevitable, ensuing heartbreak.”

Besson uses his matter-of-fact, spare style when describing acts of intimacy to prove to readers that sex is a part of life and love. He doesn’t sugarcoat, but he doesn’t under-emphasize. He sums up the relationship with one line in particular: “The rest of the time we stay in bed, kissing, sucking, fucking.” Besson even shares his experience in the porn industry in California. He focuses on the performers’ bodies, how they frolic and dance in front of the camera. “Their vulnerability touches me,” he writes.

Besson’s scenes are revelatory. The work has a lot of parallels to André Aciman’s beloved novel-turned-movie Call Me By Your Name, the love story of two young men in an Italian seaside town. For anyone who has read or seen it, one of the most memorable scenes is when the main character, Elio, sexually devours a peach, fingering and mutilating it. In Lie With Me, it feels like Besson takes on sex in a less upfront and flowery way than Aciman. Besson’s prose is simple but incredibly intimate. Just as two lovers grow more open with each other the longer they are together, Besson becomes more open too, revealing the moments of “pure abandon” and “self oblivion” inherent with this feeling of comfortability. He doesn’t rely on controversial depictions of gay sensuality to engage readers, but reveals it sensitively. If Call Me By Your Name can be summed up by an exploding peach, Lie With Me would be more appropriately summed up by a fallen soufflé. It’s less orgasmic and in your face, favoring a more delicate and provocative approach.

Molly Ringwald also achieves an elegant translation. As a teenager in the ‘80s, Ringwald portrayed young people struggling with their identities in Sixteen Candles (1984), The Breakfast Club (1985), and Pretty in Pink (1986). In an interview with Vanity Fair, she expressed that she is drawn to telling the stories people of at this age because of how strongly emotions are felt. Philipe’s love story resonated strongly with Ringwald: “The first time you fall in love and get your heart broken will never hurt in the exact same way. Not to say that we don’t love again, we will probably love more deeply, but the newness of the first will always serve as a sort of template against which you compare later experiences.”

In the first 90 pages, all of the parts fall into place perfectly for Phillippe, but after Thomas and Philippe break up, the second half of the story is darker, interwoven with more metafictional elements and reflection. It feels like readers are writing the novel with Besson, feeling his grief. He describes propping up a photo he took of Thomas next to his keyboard as he writes and talks about how he builds characters from his own experiences. It’s during this part of the book that fact and fiction blend together. Besson specifically writes that his books are entirely fiction—and that memoir doesn’t interest him. However, this contradicts much of what he has already told readers about how he constructs characters and builds life in words from the world around him.

The feeling that the readers themselves are inside the novel is common to the genre of autofiction, a form of fictionalized autobiography. Besson’s semi-autobiographical writing steps into this territory. Many French authors—Camille Laurens, Annie Ernaux, Pierre Mérot and Hervé Guibert, to name a few—are known to infuse their autobiographies with fictional elements. While the genre has its roots in France, autofiction is spreading in popularity. For some writers, autofiction can be therapeutic, allowing a better understanding of who and where they are in relation to the events they’ve experienced. For others, it’s a form of closure, or a way to make their stories more engaging.

In Lie With Me, Besson directly addresses his audience, explaining how he creates scenes: “As you already know, I invented stories all the time, with so much authenticity that people usually ended up believing me (sometimes even I was no longer able to disentangle the true from the false). Could I have made this story up from scratch? Could I have turned an erotic passion into an obsession? Yes, it’s possible.” Are Besson’s words simply imagined? Is this his story or fictional Philippe’s? The games Besson plays are frustrating, but by signaling to his active process of fictionalization, he offers a provocative way for readers to examine how he memorializes his past.

Though Besson dedicates the book to Thomas Andrieu, the book is not so much centered around the particularities of Thomas but the idea of him. Readers don’t ever get a sense of Thomas’ thoughts; they only know him through Philippe’s projections of him. At the beginning, when the two boys are lying in a shed after having made love for the second time, Philippe constantly interrupts Thomas, bringing Thomas’ anecdotes back to what he is thinking about. In Philippe’s mind, everything ties back to himself. This makes sense; because Philippe himself is reflecting on his own experiences, he creates a world where everything Thomas does is for Philippe. It’s a sort of inadvertent selfishness that could be interpreted as malicious, but it is more likely a depiction of Philippe’s tunnel-visioned experience with a first love.

The title of the novel in French is “Arrête avec tes mensonges,” which translates to “stop your lying.” This is clearly a message about Phillipe’s desire for Thomas to stop lying to the world around him, to be open about his sexual preferences. However, it could also be a message Besson is making to himself about his own creation of a fantasy world surrounding his past lover. Because Besson never explicitly says that his work is a memoir, could he be revealing his own exaggerated descriptions? When Phillippe’s infatuation grows deeper, he begins to inflate the good characteristics in Thomas, which may make him lie unintentionally. Perhaps, then, the blurriness between fact and fiction in the novel is just a statement on how memory can easily turn into self-deception.

The English title—Lie With Me—is wistful and more resigned. Like the rest of the novel, it’s intimate and simple. Besson sums up this wistfulness by commenting on the irreparable, non-changing reality of his situation with Thomas: “And then everything broke—like a firework exploding on a dark night in July that spirals out in all directions, blazing brightly, dying before it touches the ground so that no one gets burned. No one gets hurt.” It’s the finality of this ending—the harsh realization that the past can’t be altered or controlled—that sticks with readers the most.

NELL SALZMAN B’22 likes soufflé more than peaches.