Philippe and Thomas are 17 years old and at school together they’ve never spoken because Philippe is in those classes that prepare the children of bourgeois families to progress in their education, and Thomas isn’t. It’s told economically in fewer than 150 pages. Of course we can’t be sure, finally, how much of the story is invented – and perhaps it doesn’t matter. The narrator is Philippe Besson, a successful writer living in Paris, remembering his adolescence. Lie With Me is set in the same small town in south-western France where he grew up, and is dedicated to a Thomas Andrieu who died in 2016, just as the character Thomas Andrieu does in the novel. His novel Lie With Me ( Arrête avec tes mensonges in French, which is more like “stop your lying”), is a bestseller in France, and a film is already in the making now it’s been translated into very readable English by the actor and writer Molly Ringwald.īesson has sometimes drawn on the lives of real individuals – Arthur Rimbaud, Marcel Proust, James Dean – for his novels, and he’s apparently made this one out of his own adolescent love story. He’s been mixed up in politics too, as French writers are prone to be, and in 2017 wrote a novelised account of Macron’s campaign for the presidency. I n France Philippe Besson is well known he’s written almost 20 novels in 18 years, and several have been adapted for film and theatre.
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