Fembio Special: Famous Lesbians
Mireille Best
born June 4, 1943 in Le Havre, France
died January 16, 2005 in Roquebrune-sur-Argens, France
French writer
20th anniversary of her death on January 16, 2025
Biography
Mireille Best was a master of the art of omission. In Les Mots de hasard, published in 1980, as well as in the books that followed, she conveyed the struggle two people – in most cases two women – have to communicate and how difficult it is for the one to find an opening to the other as much through what is left out or unsaid as through the words exchanged.
She was born during the Second World War in Le Havre, a city that was completely destroyed by bombing. Her father was a metalworker and her mother was 'without a profession,' as it was put. Her family had such severe housing problems that Mireille grew up with her maternal grandmother, a travelling fishmonger. Mireille was hard of hearing and had a lung disease and was unable to attend school regularly until she was twelve years old. It was therefore her beloved mémé who taught her reading, writing, and arithmetic and who introduced her to Victor Hugo's Les Misérables at the age of five. Mireille would later adopt her grandmother's name, Albertine Best, as her pen name.
After attending secondary school intermittently and dropping out, Mireille worked in a factory for several months. In 1966, she and her school friend Jocelyne Crampon settled in the south of France, where the sun was good for her health. For 27 years, she reluctantly lined up numbers in a tax office and wrote whenever she found the time, mainly in the evenings and on the weekends. Far removed from the literary world, she nevertheless decided to submit her finished manuscript to a leading Parisian publishing house – Gallimard. It was accepted.
The universe of her stories is the brief moment of an encounter. An encounter in which glances that touch are often betrayed by the words that are then spoken carelessly with an intent to deflect and where any movement that extends beyond this brief moment is killed by empty phrases uttered in fear of silence and of gestures that would reveal desire. The magic of Mireille Best's writing lies in the way she moves across the page. She distorts the sentence, rejects the standard punctuation, places capital letters in the middle of a sentence, and leaves spaces between two words. She often gives her texts a character that is as physical as it is written. In this way, she manages to express a twofold dialogue: one that is spoken and another that is hidden, emerging from silences or gestures.
For Mireille Best, love between girls and love between women are natural. As in her novel Camille en Octobre (Camille in October), it is others who seek a name for this love. The protagonist’s problem usually lies in her choice of the other. Often, a young woman's love is directed towards an older woman; towards a woman of the same age only if she loves another. It is always the older woman who withdraws. In contrast, the adolescent is prepared to stand up to the whole town and, in her rejection of the superficial world of adults, typically prefers to escape into books and daydreams. Mireille Best’s childhood in Le Havre was marked by poverty and thus, in addition to the moment of an encounter, the dreariness of life in a provincial town or an unspecified place finds an expression in her works. Yet the gray monotony is suddenly disrupted by single glance, and the clouds lift. The main characters do not wander through the bars in a big city at night, but through their inner world and between the walls of their feelings.
Although her novels were in step with the contemporary women's and lesbian movements, they did not deal with them. The word “lesbian” appeared late in her work (Il n'y a pas d'hommes au paradis, 1995). This was not because she rejected the word or because she feared encountering hostility, but because she lived her life and her love without compromise and with no need to justify herself. She did not belong to any political group, yet she took a firm stand for justice and humanity. The children, brothers, sisters or neighbors in her texts act in solidarity in the face of a reality that is often cruel.
Mireille Best's works were enthusiastically received by critics, who regretted that her books did not receive more attention on the book market. Thanks to Furie, a women's publishing house in Amsterdam, most of them were translated into Dutch. In addition, two novellas and two novels were published in German and her works have been studied by students of French literature at universities in the United States. A few of her books have been translated into English.
After she took early retirement in 1990 due to illness, Mireille Best was finally able to devote herself entirely to writing. She lived with her partner Jocelyn Crampon and their canine companion, a female boxer, in Roquebrune-sur-Argens, a small village near the Mediterranean. She died there in 2005.
A hibiscus blooms in the garden of her house in a beautiful amphora that contains her grandmother's ashes.
(Text from 2013, translated with DeepL.com; edited by Ramona Fararo, 2024.
Please consult the German version for additional information, pictures, sources, videos, and bibliography.)
Quotes
To tell a story means to always break into pieces, to shatter what is held together. To tell a story means to misplace things, to put them in the wrong drawers.
If I were to write a text about mourning, I would write about my grandmother. But her death is still too recent for me. She died ten years ago.
Masque's homosexual magazine in 1981: “The protagonists speak obliquely, their very, very slow smiles covering entire surfaces of emptiness and shadows.”
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