Many Unsaid Things

Grace Linden considers Kate Briggs’s new translation of “Lili Is Crying,” by Hélène Bessette.

By Grace LindenJuly 24, 2025

• Fiction

THE PUBLICATION OF Lili pleure was supposed to mark the beginning of Hélène Bessette’s glittering career. In 1953, Bessette, 35 and recently divorced from a pastor, had the backing of the novelist and experimental writer Raymond Queneau (“Finally, something new!” he ostensibly announced) and a multi-book deal with Gallimard, the esteemed French maison d’édition. And for a little while, things seemed to go that way: her work found admirers among some of the biggest names in art and literature, including Marguerite Duras (who believed Bessette created “la littérature vivante”), Nathalie Sarraute, and Simone de Beauvoir. Her novels were recognized for their ambition and daring, and Bessette received several nominations for the Prix Goncourt.

Yet despite the accolades, Bessette’s work did not find a wide audience. In 1964, Duras wrote an article for L’Express titled “Read Hélène Bessette,” in which she bemoaned the “silence that surrounded the publication of her novels.” Bessette’s final book, Ida ou le délire, arrived in 1973 and was largely ignored, and following Queneau’s death three years later, she lost the backing of Gallimard. To support herself, Bessette worked as a schoolteacher and also, for a time, a housekeeper. She died impoverished in 2000. By then, all 13 of her novels were out of print.

Now republished by New Directions and Fitzcarraldo Editions, Lili pleure (translated as Lili Is Crying by the excellent Kate Briggs) tells of the poisonous, parasitic relationship between Charlotte and her daughter Lili. The novel opens on a shepherd leading his flock down a stony footpath. The landscape is Mediterranean France, with its cypress trees, hot sunshine, and mistral, the famous ferocious wind that has shaped so much of the region’s climate and culture. As he walks, the shepherd curses this world: “Hell damnation, cruelty, lie, deceit, betrayal, tears, severances, assassination, calumny, perfidy, misery and death.” Bucolic Provence this is not.

It is the time between the two World Wars. It is “eggplants-and-tomatoes time, figs-and-pomegranates time.” Charlotte has spent her life in the area and runs a boardinghouse where the “elderly and antiquated” lodge. She is far from content with her lot and can rage as good as the wind. The world, it seems, is out to get her: “Everything has to be paid for; I wouldn’t give out a ‘Bon appétit’ for free,” Charlotte insists. She is forever the victim and loves a guilt trip (“I refused offers of remarriage, for [Lili’s] sake”). Other people’s good fortunes are met with accusations and doomsday predictions.

Lili, too, wants a larger life, though her vision resides less in material trappings than in men, a desire that appalls her mother. Like her friends Marthe and Élise, Lili craves love, affection, a relationship, sex—things she can’t (or won’t) articulate to her mother. Much of the beginning of the novel is populated with gossip, yearning, and an all-consuming crush, but there is also a covert abortion (the procedure was not legalized in France until 1975) with lasting consequences. This is, however, only obliquely addressed; Lili Is Crying is a far cry from Annie Ernaux’s L’Événement (2000).

What comes to pass is not altogether surprising. Lili, straining against the constraints of her life, meets someone and marries. She betrays her mother: “I wanted to get on with my life, cries Lili. I do have the right to get on with my life.” The young couple moves away. A severance occurs between mother and daughter, and the husband is blamed. “It was him,” thinks Charlotte. “That man, he must have prevented her from coming. […] That man is the guilty one.”

And then it is undone. Lili and her husband return to the town and open a restaurant not too far from the boardinghouse. Bitter Charlotte hates her daughter’s husband, the interloper (and a foreigner to boot), and does nothing to conceal her feelings: “They’re not very intelligent where you come from, are they? I’m from a good race.” Lili is forced to choose: mother or husband, past or future.

To read Lili Is Crying is to read the many unsaid things. In fact, the text, which resembles a poem, often makes it difficult to distinguish between the two. The novel was the first published example of what Bessette and her son hoped would become a new literary movement. Their “Gang du roman poétique” developed “a nonconformist novel-writing practice” that relied as much on typography and visual presentation as it did on words themselves. Like a poem, the text of Lili Is Crying is columnar, with short, staccato lines that break at syntactically improbable moments. Bessette plays with capitalization, enjambment, and her favorite—the tiret, or em dash. This she deploys to mark speech, though it isn’t always clear when a character is talking aloud or internally. As a result, dialogue and deliberation blur together, and there are moments where it is hard to know if a character’s most vicious (or most vulnerable) inner thoughts have been revealed for all to hear.

Then there is Bessette’s language, which is musical, descriptive, and heavy on imagery. Marthe tells Lili to hold fast to joy, saying (or maybe thinking), “Red happinesses to crunch on in the sun like the pomegranates / I put in your basket.” A “bright red love” spreads like “blood pooling from a wound.” This emphasis on experience suggests not only that emotion takes priority over logic but also that emotion equates to logic.

Lili, too, is ever shifting because she does not have much of a backbone. She is easy prey for Charlotte, who works ever harder to bind her daughter to herself. Part of me tried to sympathize with Lili, who wants a big love but treats relationships like a teenager kissing a photograph of a movie star. Yet she never seems to grow much beyond a teenager, her life a series of whims and impulses and great, devastating feelings. But this is the behavior that has been modeled for her, as Charlotte, like Lili, has little regard for others. Such selfishness is both a form of self-sabotage and entirely misguided.

The intertwined protagonists of Lili Is Crying are at once victims and villains. Sometimes it is hard to say who is what and when, which makes Charlotte and Lili exceptionally believable because no one is ever just one thing forever. Several recent, well-received novels have portrayed “bad” women as merely “bad,” with no other personality traits. Theoretically, this is vindication for centuries of one-dimensional female characters who are described only as charming or sweet or pretty. Embracing evil would seem to be a feminist act. But the pendulum has swung too far because now the immoral women are only ever immoral; they aren’t even allowed to be funny. Save for an exceptional few, most of us have the ability to be compassionate and caustic, greedy and virtuous, wicked and, yes, droll and stupid too. Characters who are imbued with badness for the sake of badness are as boring and implausible as someone who is only kind.

Lili and Charlotte are many things, often all at once. They are far from boring or even predictable, a sense underscored by the novel’s format. Poetry laughs at grammar’s strict requirements. Poems, like life, want oxymorons and confrontation. Emotion needs mess, but mess is not always palatable.

It would be easy to superimpose Bessette’s biography over Lili Is Crying. Charlotte is unhappy. Her love life is a mess. Bessette, too, did not have the career she envisioned, and her personal life wasn’t so straightforward. But to interpret the novel this way would be to make Bessette suffer another indignity. For one thing, Lili Is Crying arrived at the start of her career, not the end. For another, this biographical reading denies the novel the complexity that Bessette’s writing so clearly deserves. And this would be another flattening gesture in a career that was shaped by them—but which never saw Bessette make that mistake with her own creations.