First published in 1953, Lili is Crying is about the fractious relationship between Charlotte and her daughter, Lili. Charlotte runs a boarding house in Provence and dotes on Lili to the point of domination. In the beginning, Lili falls in love with a character referred to only as ‘the young man’. He wants to be with her but she finds that she cannot abandon her mother, which is one of the reasons she is crying. ‘Everyone has a mother,’ the young man says, ‘but we don’t all smash up our lives for her sake.’ Lili does. 

Time passes. Lili becomes pregnant by another man and has an abortion. She marries him and her mother disapproves of the match because of his background. When the war arrives, Lili’s husband is deported to Dachau and Charlotte is happy to see him go. The fortunes of the boarding house fluctuate, the husband returns and Charlotte is mad at him for surviving. Lili is also angry because by now she is having an affair with a shepherd much younger than herself.

Kate 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’. The sentences splutter and tumble, tripping over themselves. Bessette described her book as a roman poétique