Lie With Me: A Novel

If you loved Call me by your name , you are going to love this one too.

Sensual, heart breaking, exposed, honest, real. As a gay man who grew up in a difference decade on a different continent, this boom resounded with me.

A beautifully nostalgic coming of age story. The writing is simple but captures rural France, the late '80s and young love perfectly.

Well written short novel. Beautiful and sad. But still full of life.

Sooo good, take a place in my heart, I love this book

first read for this year and all i can say is i am off to a good start

Beautiful! Heartbreaking! God, the writing was divine! Great performance! Highly recommend!

A beautifully told story. Reminds a bit of A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara.

A beautifully translated novel about love lost. It was written in a way where you’re thinking that it’s the writer’s story, but it’s actually a faux memoir.
I love Jacques Roy’s narration, his French rolls so smooth and I could listen to him all day.

Oh boy :'( Estos primeros amores casi siempre terminan mal, ha sido una bonita y triste historia.

¡No puede ser!
Estoy llorando, es muy triste saber que para amar necesitas aprobar los estándares de la sociedad. Y que a veces tienes que ocultarte, el problema es cuando te ocultas tan bien, que después ya no te encuentras.

I’m sobbing ??
Sad perfect story
Brought me to tears

An interesting story where insight comes later and the pieces of the puzzle begin to form. There are many "what if" thoughts now that it is finished. I guess it could be the door not opened.

“Have you noticed how the most beautiful landscapes lose their brilliance as soon as our thoughts prevent us from seeing them properly?”
What a powerful book

Poignant. Tragic yet Beautiful.

I’ve read the more than a month ago and I found the writing great, endearing, direct, truthful. It was then that I’ve researched and found out that this is a genre known in France, an autobiographical fiction. Where the reader was placed in between to question whether did this happened in real life or not - and that was what I felt reading the book. And it is a writing that is trying to make a connection on beliefs and experiences.

I love how the characters were the antithesis of each other and how the English title fit as well, as the word “lie” is a double entendre. One who has always lived his life freely and truthfully, yet lied to be with his lover, while the other kept living his life in seclusion and lies yet has found someone where he can lie beside with.

This narrator here is very good!
His French in on point. The flow of his words and voice are easy and lovely. My ears wanted more.

I get the story and I totally relate to it... got the vibe from you✌️ and certainly loved it!

Relatable, its my story too, i was crying while listening, it is sad but i love the feelings to be inlove again...

A gentle, moving and powerful story that leaves me with tears in my eyes at the end I highly recommend

It’s a good read, honest and intimate, there are really well written details, worthy of the time.

It was a beautiful, sad story. It’s painful always to read about a hidden love, one that was never fully realized.

This was a beautiful, painful read, full of questions and half-answers that make your heart ache while you smile.

Short, but an important story. Told with honesty and earnest openness. I took every part of this to heart.

It was a good book, I just wish it ended differently

A short, but powerful tale of youthful romance and the view from later in life when contrasting ambitions and pathways combine to intensify the emotional tenor of this beautiful narrative. There is young desire, longing for the other and quiet regret when the paths of the young lovers diverge. The prose is spare yet it evokes all the feelings that the protagonist, Phillipe, experiences as he shares intimacies with another boy named Thomas. I could not put down this stunning novel of young desire.

Lie With Me by Philippe Besson, translated by Molly Ringwald (yes THAT Molly Ringwald)

I want you to take a moment and remember your first love. The feeling in your chest on catching sight of them. The sound of their voice, their laughter. The way your hand would tingle after their touch. The hours spent daydreaming of what your future would be like. How it felt that there could not possibly be a love stronger than this. How still to this day you think of them. Wonder about them. About what might have been.

Now, let me introduce you to Lie With Me by Philippe Besson

While being interviewed in a hotel lobby for his latest novel, Philippe glimpses a young man who bears a striking resemblance to his first love. Without thinking he follows the man and takes us back to the story of his first love, Thomas.

This book captures the intensity and uncertainty of young love. The fumbling emotions and jealousy made more pointed by the difficulties of being gay. Philippe and Thomas's relationship is intense and all-consuming, and Besson does a fantastic job of bringing this to life. The story does not shy away from the fear, confusion, and isolation that many queer individuals experience, and a reminder of the challenges that many people still face today.

The novel reads like memoir but we are made to wonder how authentic the material is. From the outset the author himself declares that as a writer he tends towards embellishing and misremembering. The English title of the book (different from the French "Arrête avec tes mensonges," which means "Stop with your lies.") has so many meaning - romantic, invitational, and colluding – but it doesn’t take away from the story itself.

Lie with Me is a moving exploration of queer love, desire, and heartbreak. It is about how first love can define our lives and is a memory that you will carry with you for the rest of your life.

On reflection, this was a beautiful short read. I came very close to tears welling in my eyes, which for me is the equivalent of effusive weeping for regular schmucks. Ringwald's translation is sensitive and elegantly pitched; the whole affair is draped in a kind of fragile grace.
(My only complaint is both minimal and mundane, and directed at the translator, the one and only Ms. Molly Ringwald. I think we need to retire the use of the word "sex" as a noun describing the genitals. It's a little too... Lawrence Durrell.)

A beautiful novella/memoir. Besson insists it is fiction, but the novella itself is replete with references to the main character denying his novels are actually memoir and each time he is totally lying. If this is fiction, Besson is a master. He created a beautiful and utterly believable story.The book covers the first love of our narrator who is named, like the "novelist", Philippe, and his reintroduction to that lover's story 20+ years after he left. Besson magically captures the ephemeral beauty of first love, which in spite of that ephemerality, remains with us forever because it is the only love we ever have before heartbreak makes us too cautious to be fully vulnerable. The story's end, many years later reached by coincidence or fate breaks the heart into smaller bits. There is nothing surprising or revolutionary here. Rather it is a relatable tale, filled with feelings most of us have had, told in the simplest yet most lyrical way. It is simply lovely. I listened to the audio, and thought the narrator, Jacques Roy, was excellent.

Few books rise head and shoulders above others in their class. These books touch us in vulnerable places, impact us strongly as we read them and stay in our minds and hearts long after we’ve read them They become the books we will keep in our personal libraries, will re-read and re-read again and we feel and experience rather than just read.
The authors of such books do more than simply convey the message of the printed page, they imbue their writing with the unmistakable breath of their own experience. While pain and heartbreak are the most likely subjects of such books as they are in Lie with Me, authors writing on any subject can convey feeling and emotion with such clarity and strength that the reader cannot help but feel that he, too, has shared an emotional experience. Poetry is best suited for these experiences, but fiction, non-fiction and autobiography can also be written well enough to transport readers to feelings and places in their hearts they rarely reveal to others.
As a child, I first felt this kind of empathic connection to an author when I read Old Yeller by Fred Gibson. Over the many years since I’ve read it, I have never doubted that the story was a genuine portrayal of love for a pet and pain experienced when the pet came to its tragic end. The storyline may have been fictional, but the emotions bleeding through the pages were genuine.
Lie with Me may be auto-biographical as a genre or may be better described as fiction, but there can be no doubt that it is honest. It bares the soul and the pain of its author as few books ever do.
The story of a gay adolescent/man unable to accept his orientation, the damage his living lie does to others, the extension of his lie in his adult relationship, the impact on the man who truly loved him as well as on himself transcends the details of the plot and storyline. This is the kind of book that will recall in all gay readers their own struggles with self-acceptance, but more importantly, it cannot help but impact heterosexual readers with a greater empathy for those who do not share their sexual orientation.
Toni Morrison’s books often operate in much the same way. They cause African American readers to recall their own struggles and the injustices they suffer throughout their lives. But they also build empathy, compassion and understanding in what readers of what racism is, does and continues to do in a society that would rather handle the issues of racism by pretending they don’t exist.
In spite of what the 1969 Stonewall episode did for toleration, acceptance and empathy for LGBTQ adults, children are still born into homes and a society which subtly, unintentionally and unconsciously presents the world through a heterosexual lens and life expectation. Children born into this environment will face the kind of struggle and denial portrayed in Besson’s book no matter how accepting society may or may not have become, just as Black Americans will be born into and grow up in a world where “whiteness” is presented as being the norm. The world greatly needs the strength of books like Lie with Me to help it understand the unintended consequences of its cultural expectations.

A beautifully straightforward coming-of-age story. A teen romance taking place in suburban France against the backdrop of the music and culture of the mid-80s, and culminating in a tragedy today, so many years later. That it was a love story of two teenage boys didn't bother me; any teen romance is about the joy and excitement of discovery, exploration, and the possibilities inherent in our bodies. Wonder expressed with skin, mouths, hands and all those pleasure receptors we are blessed with. Despite my being on the hetero end of the spectrum, I found the sex scenes recognizable and erotic and always in furtherance of this story of boys becoming men. And then men aging, fading, succeeding, failing, forgetting remembering, dying... Molly Ringwald, herself an icon of the 80s, does a fantastic job with Besson's novel, bringing it to English with simple, sparkling language that carries the story along like a blown-glass bubble created in a different era, carrying its simple atmosphere into today.

This wasn't quite what I expected. It's basically novella length which is fine because Besson's writing style is very descriptive and poetic. But, it wasn't a story I felt "unfamiliar" with. I'm not sure what I was expecting... but it wasn't this.

It's a sweet story... very sad. But I have to say I think there are better versions of this particular tale.

Definitely, well-written seems like a good translation! Just not my thing maybe.