Lili Is Crying

by Hélène Bessette, Kate Briggs (Translator), Eimear McBride (Introduction)

Overview

A forgotten mid-century genius, recently rediscovered in France and never before translated into English, Hélène Bessette is a treasure and a bracing force to reckon with.

Lili Is Crying, Hélène Bessette’s debut novel, conveys with singular force 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 1953 publication for its boundary-pushing style, Lili Is Crying catapulted Bessette to cult status in France. The novel is moving and maddening in turns, with its characters trapped in their own cruelties and sorrows, but in its spareness and strength it feels true. "Show me a woman who's chosen something." Bessette's books were hailed for their unusual economy of expression, rarity, strange humor, and sheer vivacity. She characterized her new kind of novel as "a freshly cut slice of life, whose force comes from its lack of commentary."

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780811239660
Publisher:	New Directions Publishing Corporation
Publication date:	07/22/2025
Pages:	192
Product dimensions:	5.10(w) x 7.90(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Hélène Bessette (1918–2000) published thirteen novels with Gallimard between 1953 and 1973, won the Prix Cazes in 1954, and was twice in the running for the Prix Goncourt and the Prix Médicis. In 1956, Bessette co-founded with her son Le Gang du roman poétique (G.R.P): “The Gang of the Poetic Novel,” an intergenerational literary movement of two. After her editor Raymond Queneau’s death in 1976, her publisher ceased to support her. She died in poverty, in poor mental health, in 2000, her body of work out of print, her singular articulation of what, with specific intent, she called “the poetic novel” under-recognized and, until recently, forgotten.

Kate Briggs grew up in Somerset, UK, and is the translator of two volumes of Roland Barthes’s lectures and seminar notes: 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.

Editorial Reviews

"AT LAST, SOMETHING NEW!"— Raymond Queneau

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

"It is as if the genre of the novel has been subject to something like a process of phenomenological reduction. There is power: close, binding, and unevenly distributed. And as part of this, there are processes. Charging the atmosphere. It’s an electric storm. It started, we’re not told when—and it hasn’t ended yet. It continues. It is not clear (if and) when it will stop. Lili is crying."— Kate Briggs

"Lili is Crying is stunning: a choral fever-dream of a book cycling through passion and despair, loyalty and betrayal. Bessette’s cadence and lyrical concision are bewitching and necessarily airless, much like the mother-daughter relationship they chronicle. It’s also a vivid and unforgettable portrait of place – a sun-drenched landscape with world war at its fringes, and the slow fade of one era into another. Kate Briggs’s translation is a powerful channelling of Bessette’s voice: distinct, unapologetic and eerily present.

"— Daisy Lafarge, author of Lovebug

"Lili is Crying is not straightforwardly tragic – as the title may initially trick us into believing – but darkly funny, marvellously strange, insistently performative and, somehow, truer than true."— Saba Sam, author of Send Nudes

"This book is brilliant and bizarre, a Grey Gardens-esque tragicomedy, as if written by a sinister cousin of Stevie Smith."— Camilla Grudova, author of The Coiled Serpent

"[Lili Is Crying] felt electric and urgent, as if Bessette should have long been in my canon, with Ingeborg Bachmann or Elizabeth Hardwick, Lynne Tillman and Annie Ernaux. Lili shares the cartoon’s casual violence, which is not to say the novel is comic, though at times it is, yes, darkly funny. It is beautiful, brutal."— Jennifer Kabat 4Columns

"Bessette’s prose is prickly and snappy [in this] tale of bust-ups, mistakes and life-ruining decisions in a fiery, fickle relationship between a mother and daughter. 

"— Francesca Peacock The Spectator

"Bessette’s remarkable prose, complete with freewheeling swerves from spoken dialogue to internal monologue, propels the action without losing sight of the characters’ intense emotions."— Publishers Weekly (starred)

"Lili Is Crying tells of the poisonous, parasitic relationship between Charlotte and her daughter Lili. The novel is populated with gossip, yearning, and an all-consuming crush."— Grace Linden Los Angeles Review of Books

"ate Briggs’s deft translation brings Hélène Bessette’s novel into English for the first time. Bessette plays with line breaks and typography, exercising what Eimear McBride refers to in her beautiful introduction as “formal indiscipline”…. Lili is Crying is the loudest book I have ever read. From Lili’s “desperate sobs” to the “trumpeting love” of Lili and the shepherd, the writing rattles like a set of cutlery in a tumble dryer. Miraculously, all the noise coheres into an elegant symphony."— Oonagh Devitt-Tremblay Literary Review

"I’m grateful to Kate Briggs for her translation of Lili is Crying – a tragic, comic, invigorating book with an eccentric staccato style that blurs speech and thought."— Kathryn Scanlan, author of Kick the Latch

"A manic, brilliant maze of a book. Circular, cinematic, comic."— Sinéad Gleeson, author of Hagstone

"Scintillating. Bessette’s singular register makes this rediscovery all the more noteworthy."— Publishers Weekly (starred)

"This propulsive mother-daughter psychodrama was published to great acclaim in France in 1953 before falling into obscurity. The novel’s signature is its unusual form, which strings together short, hypnotic phrases, blurring the boundary between novel and poem"— The New Yorker

"Bessette asks the reader to step closer and look at the ceaseless, imperceptible moments in which they crack, scatter, and persevere."— Sarah Anjum Bari Full Stop

From the Publisher