Title:: [[Lili is Crying]] Authors:: [[Hélène Bessette]] Tags:: #fiction Read:: [[2025-11-14]] Instagram :: https://www.instagram.com/p/DRAzSgKDnVQ/ ## Editions - Edition:: [[New Directions]] 2025 - Original Copyright:: 1953 - Pages:: 192 ## Purchase * Bookshop.org:: https://bookshop.org/a/94437/9780811239660 ## Cover Photo `` ## Annotations The plot is simple: Lili, an adult woman living with her overbearing and psychologically abusive mother, Charlotte, tries to navigate the space between her own wants and the expectations she ms been conditioned to meet. Because her mother has always been this way, it feels like Lili never developed the muscle memory required to stray too far into her own dreams. This is why Lili is (almost always) crying.  But what really stands out isn’t so much the plot but how Bessette presents it. She aspired to write the roman poétique, the poetic novel, and here that manifests less in musicality (at least to me) and more in form. The sentences are short, often fragments. There’s white space everywhere. Indentations get deployed like emotional punctuation, shaping the feeling as much as the words do.  I read an essay by Kate Briggs (who translated this) in the Yale Review about Bessette, and coincidentally she cites an interview from the 90s with Helen DeWitt. In the interview, DeWitt complains about “how attached to and constrained publishing can be ‘by a specific restricted idea of what text is, which is this: text is word.’” I love this! Bessette’s out here pushing these boundaries in 1953, and DeWitt’s Your Name Here is, in its own way, the full manifestation of that idea that writing isn’t just the words, but the form, the style, the architecture, even the existence of the text on the page.  Anywhoo, I liked this a lot.