Books like Bonjour Tristesse

For another Sagan heroine who knows exactly what she is doing

Dominique is a young student in Paris who begins an affair with an older married man largely because she is curious, bored, and attracted to the possibility of feeling something new. Like Cécile, she can see the emotional consequences of what she is doing without necessarily stopping herself. It is quieter and more adult than Bonjour Tristesse, but it has the same cool voice, sexual freedom, and unsettling distance between understanding other people and actually caring for them.

For the Riviera when the beautiful people start falling apart

Fitzgerald gives you villas, beaches, drinking, money, affairs, parties, and Americans drifting through the French Riviera, but the glamour is already beginning to crack. His characters have everything required for a beautiful life and still manage to damage themselves and one another. It is much longer and sadder than Bonjour Tristesse, but if you loved the contrast between the perfect Mediterranean setting and the emotional disaster happening inside it, this is one of the best books to read next.

For another young woman enjoying her freedom in France

Sally Jay Gorce is twenty-one, living in Paris, sleeping with the wrong people, going to parties, making bad decisions, and having an extremely good time doing it. She is older and much funnier than Cécile, and the book is more comic than tragic, but it has the same pleasure in watching a young woman discover that freedom can be exhilarating without necessarily making her sensible.

For sunshine, beautiful people, and something very wrong underneath

Tom Ripley enters a world of money, beaches, boats, cafés, and wealthy young Americans living beautifully in Europe. He wants that life badly enough that ordinary morality gradually becomes inconvenient. The story is a thriller rather than a coming-of-age novel, but it shares Bonjour Tristesse’s wonderful contrast between gorgeous Mediterranean leisure and a protagonist calmly doing things that should horrify us.

For a young woman looking back at dangerous desire

A teenage girl begins a relationship with an older man in colonial Indochina, and Duras writes about sex, money, family, power, and memory with extraordinary emotional restraint. It is darker and more fragmented than Sagan, but both writers refuse to turn a young woman’s sexuality into a simple lesson about innocence or morality. If you liked how little Bonjour Tristesse tells you what to think about Cécile, The Lover offers another complicated young woman without explaining her away.

For sex, jealousy, and games on the French coast

A newly married couple spend their honeymoon drinking, swimming, eating in cafés, and traveling along the Mediterranean coast until sexual experimentation and jealousy begin changing the marriage. Hemingway’s characters are older than Cécile, but the setting and emotional ingredients are surprisingly close: beautiful weather, enormous freedom, erotic curiosity, and the gradual realization that people can hurt one another even when nobody intended for the summer to become serious.

For rich people turning desire into disaster

The geography is completely different, but the emotional machinery will feel familiar. Fitzgerald puts beautiful, privileged people into a world of parties, alcohol, romance, and apparently limitless possibility, then watches selfishness and desire produce consequences nobody really wants to accept. If what stayed with you from Bonjour Tristesse was the frightening ease with which charming people can ruin one another’s lives, Gatsby belongs here.

For another young woman who refuses the life she is supposed to want

Esther Greenwood is older, more serious, and in a much darker psychological place than Cécile, but both books are built around exceptionally observant young women looking skeptically at the adult lives being offered to them. Plath is funnier than people sometimes remember, especially when Esther watches dating, marriage, work, and conventional femininity with complete disbelief. Read it if Cécile’s intelligence and resistance to becoming a “proper” young woman interested you more than the Riviera setting.

For beautiful people with too much time and not enough character

Anthony and Gloria are young, attractive, privileged, in love with pleasure, and remarkably bad at building an actual life. Drinking, money, boredom, vanity, sex, and resentment gradually turn their glamorous existence into something ugly. It is a messier and more sprawling novel than Sagan’s, but it shares her interest in what happens when people have enough freedom to reveal exactly who they are.

For sex, France, and a summer that seems outside ordinary life

Set largely in provincial France, Salter’s novel follows an intense sexual affair imagined through the eyes of another man. It is more explicit, dreamlike, and male-centered than Bonjour Tristesse, but it has the same sense of entering a temporary world where ordinary obligations have disappeared and desire seems capable of filling every empty hour. Read it if the heat, leisure, erotic freedom, and slightly unreal quality of Sagan’s summer were what you wanted to stay inside.