About Lily

By: lilybfrancis Uncategorized 0 Comments 6 January 2020

Last October, Léa Clément, author and blogger, interviewed me about my book on perinatal grief. I am sharing this interview with you today.

My novel is being translated into English, my website is ready, it’s time for me, after 6 months spent on the social networks in your company, to tell you a little more about myself and my writings.

To find out more, read below:

“Lily B. Francis delivers in her novel “Poussières de toi” a moving testimony on perinatal death which affects nearly 7000 families in France every year.

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The death of a newborn baby in a maternity ward is not a normal event and yet women regularly go to the maternity ward to deliver a dead or rapidly dying child. The simultaneity of an expected life and death at the same time brings parents into the intolerable and unthinkable.

In her novel “Poussières de toi”, Lily B. Francis talks about this delicate and still taboo subject.

💭Hi Lily 🙂 How are you doing?

I’m very well, thank you 🙂

💭 Who are you?

I am Lily B. Francis, a freelance author with a passion for reading, art and history. I have been writing for over 20 years. I have been a full-time author for the past 3 years. After studying history, I worked for 10 years in real estate, then I took the risk of leaving everything to live from my passion, writing.

I published a series of 4 books (romantic comedy), Chronicles of a Machiavellian Princess, then two other more personal novels, “Poussières de toi”, which deals with perinatal mourning, and “Reviens vite” which evokes, through 3 characters, several forms of loss in the course of life: the loss of a love, the loss of dreams, and the loss of self.

💭Why do you write?

Because I can’t not write.

At first I wrote because reading had become frustrating. So I started writing the stories I wanted to read. And then, writing became a necessity, like breathing. If I don’t write I am suffocating. Writing, for me, means freeing myself from what is on my heart, and breathe.

💭 You published “Poussières de toi” in 2018. Can you tell us about it?

When I had a medical interruption of pregnancy in 2011, I was very confused, I couldn’t understand why no one had told me that you could get pregnant and not have a baby. I felt an overwhelming loneliness in the silence that surrounded me, and I told myself that one day I would write about this subject. Thus was born Poussières de toi, a novel about perinatal grief that follows the journey of Alice, a young woman trying to recover from the loss of her baby at 5 months of pregnancy.

💭 Who is this book written for?

This book is written for all those who wish to understand what parents facing perinatal bereavement go through, and of course it is addressed to these parents so that they can find an echo to what they have been through, and tell themselves that they are not alone.

💭 What message did you want to give?

To take into consideration the loss of these babies, because even if they did not really live, they really existed in the hearts of the parents. And no longer to remain silent on the subject. Obviously, it is delicate to talk about it, it is an intimate pain, but at least show consideration for this loss, acknowledge that it has happened.

💭 What is the best compliment that can be said about this novel?

The most beautiful compliment is when people thank me for putting into words this pain and loss. When a mother contacts me in a private message to say: “THANK YOU for talking about it, everyone has forgotten my baby and I still think about it every day” it justifies all the difficulty I had in writing this book. I have received many private messages following the publication of Poussières de toi, from mothers who have experienced perinatal bereavement and who never talk about it to anyone around her, not even to their partner. And this has comforted me in the publication and promotion of my novel. That kind of loneliness has to be broken.