A friendship is a filiation we choose. It holds love and laughter; it can extend our sense of the possible. Moved to honour a form of relation often subordinated to romantic and familial ties, and to explore a part of her own history, Hélène Giannecchini pieces together an alternative genealogy of queer ancestors. In searching and sensitive prose, she sifts the past to bring existences deemed 'marginal' into communion with each other, traces of which may remain only in memory and archival fragments. Roving from Casa Susanna, a space of freedom from persecution in McCarthyite North America, to the diary of a man living with HIV in France, and to the life and work of pioneering lesbian photographer Donna Gottschalk, each narrative counters oblivion through loving acts of witness. A slantwise gathering of queer life and activism in the twentieth century, interspersed with images encountered by chance, An Army of Lovers Cannot Fail establishes friendship as a vital political force and offers a moving testament to its liberatory power.
About the Author :
Hélène Giannecchini is a writer, curator and lecturer on history and contemporary art theory at the University of Lille. She is the author of Une image peut-être vraie (2014, published in English as Alix Cléo Roubaud: A Portrait In Fragments, tr. Thea Petrou), Voir de ses propres yeux (2020) and An Army of Lovers Cannot Fail (2024), all published in France by Éditions du Seuil. Her current research focusses on the visual history of gender minority groups in the latter half of the twentieth century.
Review :
‘An Army of Lovers Cannot Fail is a florilegium of countersexual kinmaking, survival strategy, lesbian comradeship, dinner parties full of queer ancestors, fugitive photography, transfeminist acting-up, insurrectionary eroticism and pieces of anonymous queer archival ephemera from many lands, brought alive with the help of critical fabulation. The domination of the couple-form over human life can and must be brought to an end, and Giannecchini deftly points to all the places where it is already dead (or perhaps always was). At the heart of this beautiful book lies a deceptively incendiary critique of capitalist society. It asks a direly urgent question: can humanity rise to the challenge of the term “friend”? If not, how do we propose to live together?’
— Sophie Lewis, author of Abolish the Family
‘We could be friends, we could be lovers, we could be comrades. Queer people are specialists in the art of chosen families because we have to be. Giannecchini’s book is not just about such bonds, it’s made by making them. In a world intent on crushing us all into isolated particles, this is an essential guide for everyone in how to glue together a fuller and deeper life.’
— McKenzie Wark, author of Love and Money, Sex and Death
‘As someone who has long struggled with conventional ideas of family and marriage, I felt relieved and hopeful reading this searching text. Hélène Giannecchini swings open the doors to a great hall of kinship, camaraderie, companionship and neighbourliness. She writes with love and optimism and a desire that we may all become part of communities in which we endeavour, as friends, to hold one another up. This came at a difficult moment in my own life, a period shaped by the death of my father, and I am grateful to have been able to read it.’
— Lara Pawson, author of Spent Light
‘At once a memoir and a sociology of friendship, kin, and chosen family, An Army of Lovers is lucid, impassioned and reasoned to a fault. Alternating between intimate, personal narratives and research-based models of kinship, Hélène Giannecchini reflects on their myriad permutations and outcomes, and provides us with an urgent, amorous manual for living.’
— Moyra Davey, author of Index Cards
‘What a stunning, deep book! Giannecchini has dug down to the marrow, to find the sparkling cells that queer people through the ages have always made – the lights we’ve used to find each other. I am so relieved that this book found me, because life without books like these, as without friends, is lonely. Giannecchini’s work is to listen hard, to the voices of our queer elders, and to the signals from her own heart, and to share her findings with the world – we are all richer for her work. The writing shines; it is always brief, but never fast. Always thoughtful, but never heavy. I couldn’t stop reading, and I want to start again immediately.’
— Adam Zmith, author of Solemates
‘A tender treatise on the importance of queer friendship that offers alternative modes of being to resist the dual forces of capitalism and the heteropatriarchy, this book extends hope and solidarity through its considered, thoughtful prose. Through narrative intervention, both fictional and factual, Hélène Giannecchini illuminates the role archival work such as this can play in shaping queer life into a more optimistic future while acknowledging all that we owe to our past.’
— Elizabeth Lovatt, author of Thank You For Calling the Lesbian Line
‘This book is a small revolution in contemporary French writing.’
— Collateral
‘Hélène Giannecchini never gives the impression of appropriating the stories of others.... [T]he quality of the author’s focus draws from the resources she mobilizes to write about friendship: her curiosity and sensitivity towards fragile lives are combined with an imagination that grants dignity to that which is forgotten by history, and allows us to talk about those ties that have no name.’
— En Attendant Nadeau
‘Hélène Giannecchini invites us to explore the thousand and one ways of composing an alternative genealogy. Essay, non-fiction or novel? We can’t decide and we don’t need to, because this book is so powerful.’
— L’Humanité
‘A compelling work, between investigation and narrative.’
— Le Monde
