By Philippe Besson
Translated by Molly Ringwald
(Éditions Julliard, 2017; Scribner, 2019)
I keep a list on my phone of books that I want to read. It’s grown so much I know I’ll never get to them all in this life. It makes me smile. Sometimes we are capable of change. I was one of those kids in junior high and in high school who would stand among the book stacks in a library—any library— shifting my weight back and forth, my legs suddenly very weak from the sheer pain of having to be there. It was the same as whenever I’d have to go shoe shopping with my mother or, now that I think of it, with anyone who wanted to “just try on a few.” Libraries and shoe stores were painful. I was one of those kids who’d stare blankly at all the crammed together book spines and say, “I can’t find anything I want to read.” Translation: I don’t want to read. Reading couldn’t compete with TV and record albums.
Maybe that’s why I like to scroll through my reading list. It feels overwhelming if I view it with that task-oriented part of my brain. Impossible! Too many! Stop adding titles. (High School Me pipes up: Which one’s the shortest?) The rest of me feels comforted. I’ll never run out of books to entertain me. And how amusing it is now that I find myself sitting in front of the television, remote in hand, scrolling through Netflix offerings, only to declare half an hour later, “I can’t find anything to watch.”
High School Me is quite happy that Philippe Besson’s Lie with Me is a short book, only 148 pages. That task-oriented part of my brain is relieved to delete it from the To Read list, not once but three times. I hadn’t realized that I’d kept reading about this book from various sources—a glowing write-up in The New York Times Book Review, a high rating from a friend on Goodreads, a rave from The Advocate: “The Best Gay Novel of 2019 Depicts Gay Sex with a Masterful Touch.” Oh, and High School Me—okay, University Me (I’m really dating myself)—might have been a little interested since the French book was translated by Molly Ringwald. Yep, that Molly Ringwald. Whatever it takes.
It’s hard to write much about the story without giving too much away. Indeed, you get a sense of the ending just by glancing at the dedication. As someone who went on to a teaching career as a passionate advocate of books, I always implored my students not to skip over the dedication. “There’s a story there,” I’d say. “Imagine what that relationship is between the author and the person in the dedication.” In this case, Besson will fill us in.
The story is told in three chapters, each set during a different time period. The first chapter is by far the longest, set in 1984, when Philippe is in his final year of high school in a French town people drive through on the way to somewhere else. This is where he meets Thomas Andrieu, a student in the same year, but not in the same classes. The school is on a sort of track system. Philippe is bound for higher learning and greater things; Thomas is not. The two boys get involved in a highly clandestine relationship. Is it just sex or something more? Could it even be love?
The second chapter involves a chance encounter in 2007 in Bordeaux, just more than an hour away from the place Besson grew up. The final chapter takes place in Paris, 2016, a meeting, agenda unknown. That’s all I want to say about the plot. This is a story about a gay relationship that cannot be fully realized in a society where homosexuality is still shunned. Lie with Me is similar in circumstance and style to E.M. Forster’s Maurice, Annie Proulx’s Brokeback Mountain and the Oscar-winning movie, “Moonlight.”
Lie with Me is a curious work that makes the reader—or me, at least—nosy. It reads like a memoir. Indeed, Besson inserts himself—or someone who shares his name—as the main character. As written on the cover, the title reads: Lie with Me: A Novel. Is this creative nonfiction? Is it “based on a true story”? Do the other characters actually exist? What about that dedication? Is all of this imagined? In an interview I read afterward, Besson plays coy. Think what you want. What I think is there’s a lot of truth to it, with some cinematic flourishes, scenes and dialogue trumped up so the reader can feel the level of emotions Besson actually does from what he truly experienced. Perhaps he replaces the “you had to have been there” moments with something more universally compelling. It works for me.
What of the gay sex mentioned so prominently in that article in The Advocate? I was curious on a purely writerly level (of course) since I have some gay manuscripts in various stages and I’m not sure how descriptive I should get about such moments. What’s publishable? What will turn off a potentially larger audience? (Yes, I realize there’s some internalized homophobia in my thinking, but there’s also pragmatism—I need to get a publisher to say, “Yes! We’re publishing this!”) I’m not unlike Jeffrey Masters, the author of the article who wrote, “It's unfair, but I often feel a tiny part of myself bracing and hesitant when it seems like two queer characters might be heading towards any sort of sexual intimacy...In direct contrast to the casual nature by which sex between opposite-sex couples is depicted on mainstream screens, queer sex is deemed less appropriate to show, something to be ashamed of and kept hidden.” Of Lie with Me, Masters says, “[T]here is sex. Lots and lots of sex.”
Having finished the book, I wonder, Did I miss something? Truly, I think the article may mislead lusty readers. This is not Penthouse Forum. Neither is it Garth Greenwell’s Cleanness. Sex happens. I don’t find that it’s incredibly detailed or all that frequent. There’s a frankness to how it’s written, but that is Besson’s approach to all of the story. Maybe there is scads more sex than I recall. Maybe my inner prude glossed over all the juicy details. The overall interplay between characters and Besson’s attempts to comprehend the situations are far more memorable.
I’ll share two excerpts, both from the 1984 section of the book. The first feels like an accurate rendering of the impact of AIDS on gay adolescents at the time:
AIDS is there...We even know its true identity. It’s no longer referred to as ‘gay cancer.’ It’s there but we think we are safe from it. We know nothing of the grand decimation that will follow, depriving us of our best friends and old lovers, that will bring us together in cemeteries and cause us to scratch out names in our address books, enraging us with so many absences, such profound loss. It is there but we aren’t afraid yet. We believe that we are protected by our youth. We are seventeen years old. You don’t die when you are seventeen years old.
The second passage captures the entirety of an encounter Besson has with stranger:
At the beginning of August, I sleep with a boy who set up his tent at the Grenettes campsite. We have sex under the canvas, indiscriminately, on a blanket stinking of sweat. I went with him because of his blond hair, bleached out by the sun and salt, his golden skin and green eyes, and because it was easy. I wasn’t looking for a diversion, or a way to soothe my pain. I wasn’t looking for an alternative. I just gave in to the ease of it. That was all.
True, truth stretched or something that is completely imagined, Lie with Me is beautifully written and always compelling. Just read it. High School Me is chiming in: “It’s so short! And so much better than shoe shopping with your mother.” (What isn’t?)
