'Lie With Me' by Philippe Besson
- Reed
- Apr 17
- 2 min read
Updated: May 8
Author: Philippe Besson (translated by Molly Ringwald)
Rating: ★★★★★ (A)
Vibe: Gay first love remembered through the haze of time—spare, aching, and quietly devastating
Quick Take: A haunting, beautifully restrained story about love, identity, and the paths we take—or leave behind. Quiet in tone but emotionally thunderous.
Set in rural France in the 1980s, Lie With Me is the story of Philippe, a reserved teenage boy, and Tomas, a classmate whose affections must stay hidden. Told decades later, it reads like memory: hazy, vivid, fragmented, and charged with emotion. Their relationship is a secret, a spark that glows in the shadows of social constraint—and its aftermath is felt across the narrator’s life.
Besson writes with stunning restraint. His style is almost spartan—tight, unsentimental, and yet capable of delivering an emotional gut punch with just a few words. There’s so much that’s left unsaid in this novel: feelings repressed, desires buried, truths deferred. But that very quietness—what isn’t said—makes the book thunderously intimate.
I found Philippe’s voice deeply relatable. His reflections on never fitting in, on how we often don’t realize the cost of blending in until much later, resonated with me. The novel doesn’t try to frame his story as a cautionary tale or a tragedy of choice—it just presents what was, with honesty and quiet sorrow.
The final scene (which I won’t spoil here) is one of the most quietly devastating endings I’ve read. Tomas’ letter, his attempt to recapture what he once had, absolutely broke me. There’s a version of my own life I can picture unfolding like his: the denial, the compromises, the carefully arranged mask of happiness. And I fear, like Tomas, it would not have ended well.
What haunts me isn’t just the love story itself—it’s the life Tomas didn’t get to live. I found myself wishing for a sequel from his perspective, not for closure, but for understanding.
Lie With Me blurs the lines between memoir and fiction in a way that enhances its impact. It invites you to inhabit the narrator’s memories, not just observe them. And it does what the best stories do: it makes the personal feel universal.
This isn’t a sweeping romance. It’s Shakespearean—a love story in the tragic sense. A celebration of fleeting joy in a life shaped by loss. And for me, it’s an A. Quiet, beautiful, and unforgettable.
