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Purchase this book
\n Lili Is Crying<\/p>\n
Originally published by Gallimard in 1953,\u00a0Lili Is Crying is a small novel, the first of H\u00e9l\u00e8ne Bessette\u2019s works to be translated into English. At the time Bessette was 35, divorced with children and developing an innovative writing practice she called the \u201croman po\u00e9tique\u201d. In the late 1940s she lived in Sydney, working at the Colgate-Palmolive factory in Balmain; in France, she took up teaching and housekeeping to support her writing. When she died in 2000, Bessette was impoverished and forgotten, her 13 books \u2013 including La Route Bleue, set in Australia \u2013 out of print. As early as 1964, Marguerite Duras wrote of deeply regretting \u201cthe silence surrounding the publication of her novels\u201d.<\/p>\n
Lili Is Crying \u2013 set in Provence between the wars \u2013 is about the desperate, electric relationship between a possessive mother and her daughter. Charlotte is the shrewd proprietress of a profitable boarding house. It seems the going is good, but it\u2019s also a season of ruin. The young Lili, the titular crier, suffers under her mother\u2019s fanatical control. \u201cEveryone has a mother, but we don\u2019t all smash up our lives for her sake,\u201d complains her lover. Starry-eyed, Lili absconds with one young man and then takes up with another. Her decampment seems a necessary betrayal of Charlotte, whose rancour and bitterness excite a plot of deceit, lies, misery, shame and tears. \u201cGirl turned out badly. Girl gone crazy,\u201d thinks Charlotte. Lili is optimistic: \u201cThings never happen to me the way they do to other people. My life, it\u2019s a whole novel.\u201d<\/p>\n
What makes a novel? Bessette\u2019s crackles with disobedience, advancing waywardly across the page, her style compressed, fragmented, repetitious. Chronology is dropped, time scattered in the dust. The small unit of the sentence becomes a crucial marker of duration and simultaneity. What makes a day, a life? Lili has an abortion, war breaks out, her husband is interned in Dachau. These events are introduced lightly, jumbled asides that blanch the novel of any bourgeois cosiness. Formally, thematically, it is a book about submission and dominance \u2013 the tension between various plots, between mothers, daughters, husbands. \u201cShow me a woman who\u2019s chosen something,\u201d says Lili. Bessette uses the tiret, or dash, to indicate both acts of speech and inward talk. In a feverish, choral narration that collects the voices of Lili, Charlotte and other village wives, we glimpse a world of secret thought, sneaky gossip and chatter that reforms and deforms social bonds and hierarchies.<\/p>\n
Bessette\u2019s book is as bracing and coarse as the mistral that blows through it. Everything is reduced to something elemental. \u201cThe novel is taking its leave\u2009\/ gently\u2009\/ Like a fire going out\u2009\/ like a fire going out\u2009\/ like a fire going out,\u201d writes Bessette. Her work is remarkable and alive.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Fitzcarraldo Editions, 192pp, $26.99 <\/p>\n
\n This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on
\n September 13, 2025 as “Lili Is Crying”.<\/p>\n
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<\/p>\n Purchase this book <\/p>\n
\n Lili Is Crying<\/p>\n
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