Join Libreria, as we welcome Kate Briggs and Holly Pester as they discuss the reissued French classic, Lili is Crying by Hélène Bessette.

‘I didn’t leave with the man I loved
I left with the man I don’t love
I was unhappy
I’m still unhappy.
Because that’s how it is.
I’m not lucky.
Everything happens the wrong way around.
I don’t know how happy people do it.
I wanted to make something happen.
I’ve had enough. Enough.’

Lili is Crying, Hélène Bessette’s debut novel, explores the fraughtness and depth of the troubling relationship between Lili and her mother Charlotte. With a near-mythic quality, Bessette’s stripped-back prose evokes at once the pain of thwarted love – of desire run cold – and the promise of renewal. Lauded by critics on its initial publication in 1953 for its boundary-pushing style, Lili is Crying marked the beginning of a singular writing career. Bessette’s work is translated into English for the first time here by Windham-Campbell Prize-winning author and translator Kate Briggs.

‘Living literature, for me, in France today – it’s Hélène Bessette.’ – Marguerite Duras.

‘AT LAST, SOMETHING NEW.’ – Raymond Queneau, author of Zazie in the Metro.

About the author & translator:

Hélène Bessette (1918–2000) published thirteen novels with Gallimard between 1953 and 1973, won the Cazes prize in 1954 and was twice in the running for the Goncourt prize and the Médicis prize.

Kate Briggs grew up in Somerset, UK, and lives and works in Rotterdam, NL, where she founded and co-runs the writing and publishing project ‘Short Pieces That Move’. She is the translator of two volumes of Roland Barthes’s lecture and seminar notes at the Collège de France: The Preparation of the Novel and How to Live Together, both published by Columbia
University Press. This Little Art, her genre-bending essay on the art of translation, was published by Fitzcarraldo Editions in 2017. In 2021, she was awarded a Windham-Campbell Prize. Her debut novel, The Long Form, was published by Fitzcarraldo Editions in 2023 and shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize the same year.