In a hotel lobby the impossible happens. A novelist giving an interview glimpses, just for a moment, a young man from his past—still young, decades later. He chases the young man and reaches for his shoulder. The young man turns.
In Lie With Me, the newly translated French novel by Philippe Besson, the man is flooded with memories of a forbidden adolescent affair.
In 1984, his last year of high school, the future novelist was a shy, bookish principal’s son, and he was obsessed with Thomas Andrieu, whose reticence was cooler—shaggy hair, cigarettes, faraway looks, white sneakers. One day, digging around in his backpack in the cold winter weather, just before class, the writer looks up to see those white sneakers right in front of him. Unimaginably, Thomas had been watching him, too. Waiting for a moment to speak. A moment when no one was around.
It begins.
Thomas leaves notes saying only when and where he can meet. They climb over walls and through small windows. At school they do not speak. The terms of their affair are exquisite and often annihilating, but the alternative—“If you prefer, we can stop,” Thomas says—is unimaginable.
So, at seventeen, is life after high school. So is aging. PLEASE READ
Lie With Me by Philippe Besson, from Scribner, translated from the French by Molly Ringwald
