Meet the author Hélène Giannecchini

Join acclaimed French writer and researcher Hélène Giannecchini for a discussion of her celebrated book Un désir démesuré d’amitié (Seuil, 2024), recently published in English as An Army of Lovers Cannot Fail (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2026).

In this deeply personal and intellectually ambitious work, Giannecchini explores friendship as a transformative force, one that shapes lives, creates chosen forms of kinship, and offers alternative ways of understanding community and belonging. Drawing on her own unconventional family history, she traces a genealogy of lives and relationships often excluded from dominant narratives, recovering their stories through memory, archives, photographs, and acts of witness.

Moving between history, politics, and intimate reflection, the book brings together figures as diverse as the French revolutionary Louis Antoine de Saint-Just and photographer Donna Gottschalk, whose images documented radical lesbian organizing in New York during the 1960s and 1970s. Through these encounters, Giannecchini illuminates the enduring power of friendship as a space of solidarity, resistance, care, and reinvention.

Part essay, part archival journey, and part meditation on queer history, An Army of Lovers Cannot Fail is a moving tribute to the relationships that sustain us and a compelling exploration of friendship as a radical and liberatory practice.

The conversation will focus on the themes of the book, including chosen families, queer memory, political communities, and the enduring significance of friendship in times of social and personal transformation.