Lie With Me: A Novel

by Philippe Besson

I sense that on the other side of all the repression and self-censoring there exists an equally powerful fervor.

She looks at them regularly, she must like to remember her youth. (Or else she confuses youth with happiness, as people frequently do.)

In Goodbye, you write letters to a man you loved. A man who left you and who never answers you, and you travel all the time trying to forget him. I say: It’s not me who writes to this man, it’s a woman, my heroine. He says: Who are you trying to convince?

In the end, he remained hidden all his life. In spite of the great departure, the ambitious effort to forge a new existence, he fell back into all the same traps: shame, the impossibility of sharing a love that endures.