Of course, we have read this kind of story about forbidden love before. In the third and desperately sad final part, Lucas gets in touch with Philippe to impart some news about his father. In the second, more than 20 years after their affair ends, Philippe runs into Thomas’s doppelganger - only to discover that the good looking young man is, in fact, Thomas’s son, Lucas. In the first section, he details the affair he had with Thomas Andrieu, whom he had admired from afar for quite some time before Thomas, who was a year older than him, issued a surprise invitation. The story is divided into three parts - 1984, 20 - each of which is narrated by Philippe, a famous writer, who fell in love with a boy at his small French high school when he was 17 years old. For both boys, it is a sexual awakening that has long-lasting repercussions on how they live the rest of their lives. During those few intense months, their love is passionate but furtive.
Their affair, kept hidden because of the shame surrounding homosexuality at the time, begins in winter but is over by the summer. Lie With Me by Philippe Besson is a bittersweet novella about first love between two teenage boys in rural France in the 1980s. The passion that can’t be talked about, that has to be concealed, gives way to the terrible question: if it isn’t talked about, how can one know that it really exists? Translated from the French by Molly Ringwald. Fiction – paperback Penguin 148 pages 2019.
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