Ross Recommends: Lie With Me by Philippe Besson
It is not often I watch the film before reading the book, mainly out of a stubborn belief that the book is always better and a selfish, but entirely justified, want to create the characters and scenes with my own imagination, guided only by the hand of the author. However, a few weeks ago, though I know for certain it was a Wednesday evening, I found myself sobbing on the sofa as the credits rolled, marking the end of Olivier Peyon’s breathtaking visual interpretation of Besson’s deeply tender and visceral exploration of first love, Lie With Me. I hope then, dear reader, that you can understand why I had no choice the next day but to head into town and get myself a copy. I felt I owed it to myself to see the inspiration behind the film that had so moved me and I was not disappointed. The novel, just as I had suspected, took me to new depths of feeling and made me question if I really knew anything about love at all. I’m getting ahead of myself though, so lets take a step back.
Published originally in French in 2017, and appearing in English two years later having been delicately translated by Molly Ringwald of The Breakfast Club fame, Besson’s Lie With Me follows middle-aged author Stéphane Belcourt as, on seeing a stranger exit a hotel, he is transported back, with the ferocity and inevitability of a tidal wave, to the summer of 1984 where, at seventeen, he fell in love for the first time with his classmate Thomas Andrieu.
The novel proceeds, charting, in a dizzying blur of 148 pages, the course of that turbulent summer, as Stéphane and Thomas find themselves at odds with each other, themselves and the world, laid prostrate, bare and powerless, in the intense and unstable, yet addictive, hands of love and their own desires. We see, through Stéphan’s adolescent eyes, the painful crumbling of a childhood, broken apart piece by piece in a tangle of bedsheets, the arms of a lover, and the sticky heat of a southern sun. I adored Besson’s depiction of falling in love, with all the confusion, passion and suspense that comes as a secret relationship strives to find roots in hostile foundations. Desperate as Stéphan is for his love to appear with him in the open, Thomas’ shame and rejection of his sexuality coats their relationship, rendering it undefinable and entirely deniable, at least from his perspective.
If that wasn't enough, and believe me it is, we also see adult Stéphan, in 2007 and 2016, as he, through another, though entirely different, relationship with that stranger from the hotel, reflects on that period of his life, how much he has grown but also how stuck he is, trapped by his experience of that initial contact with love, mesmerising and torturous. As Stéphan begins to understand the propagating ripples of that dream-like summer, and learns more about the life Thomas chose to live in rejection, he moves towards acceptance, knowing that to truly love he must sacrifice his past.
Besson has created a sensitive, and deeply human, portrait of what it means to love another in spite of yourself and the cost that comes with vulnerability, which for some is too high a price to pay. I cannot encourage you enough to go and sit in a field on a warm, sunny afternoon, perhaps with some grapes, and experience this book from cover to cover. I encourage you to cry and cry and cry. Afterwards, when you place the book shakily on the ground, you will know more about yourself and love, and in doing so you will be changed for the better.
To purchase this book please click here.