Édouard

French novelist Édouard Louis has one subject – himself – and two stories to tell about it. The first, painfully recounted in his acclaimed debut, The End of Eddy, published in France when he was 21, concerns his escape from the deprived northern village where he grew up targeted for being gay. His other story, effectively an ongoing multi-part work in progress, concerns the aftermath of writing The End of Eddy, the success of which ejected him from his working-class roots and further frayed the relationships dissected in…

It has been said that the French wunderkind Édouard Louis suffers for his lack of humour. But for such a famously repetitious writer to call a book Change is at least a bit funny. Louis’s writing up to this point has been monomaniacal in its focus on the psychological and physical violence inflicted on the working classes by the structures of neoliberalism. Change is no different. This latest instalment further demarcates him as exactly what he is: one of the most important, politically vital and morally bracing writers…

French writer Édouard Louis made his debut with The End of Eddy (2017), a novel drawn from his torrid experience of growing up gay in a working-class village in northern France. Yet more distressing was his next novel, History of Violence (2018), about his rape at gunpoint by a stranger he took to bed after a chance meeting on the street in Paris. Louis addressed the nightmarish subject with extreme sophistication: where The End of Eddy is episodically anecdote-driven, History of Violence unfolds as the narrator, Édouard,…

One evening in his Paris flat, Édouard Louis, the French literary star who shot to fame at 21 with The End of Eddy, his devastating account of growing up poor and gay in the north’s far-right heartlands, found something intriguing as he was sorting through papers. It was an old photograph of his mother aged 20, looking happy. “She was smiling and full of hope,” he says with utter incomprehension, because all through his childhood he’d known her as hard, stern-faced and struggling. “I immediately started asking myself what…