Your manhood condemned you to poverty, to lack of money. Masculinity – don’t act like a girl, don’t be a faggot – meant that you dropped out as fast as you could to show everyone you were strong, as soon as you could to show you were rebellious, and so, as far as I can tell, constructing your masculinity meant depriving yourself of any other life, any other future, any other prospect that school might have opened up. In all but the first couple of pages, Édouard Louis speaks to his father, who is still alive at the time of writing, presenting him (and, of course, us) with a mosaic of memories from which emerges a picture of how the father’s ‘male privilege’ and ‘hatred of homosexuality’ affected the son, but also the constricting and distorting effect they have had on the father: For a start, it wields a certain amount of intellectual heft (Ruth Gilmore is not the only scholar to illuminate the narrative). This is not an agony memoir, a whining portrait of a father who made his Gay son’s life a misery. The same definition holds with regard to male privilege, to hatred of homosexuality or trans people, to domination by class – to social and political oppression of all kinds. When asked what the word racism means to her, the American scholar Ruth Gilmore has said that racism is the exposure of certain populations to premature death. The opening sentences of Who Killed My Father – notice the absence of a question mark, also a feature of the French title Qui a tué mon père – says a lot: It’s as if it calls out to that book: ‘This is what it’s like inside your story!’ Édouard Louis is a young Gay man who has escaped from the working-class conditions that have destroyed his father’s life. Arthur, one of the sons of the mining family in Black Sheep, disappears overnight, and only we and his youngest brother Ted know that he has escaped rather than met with disaster. ![]() Édouard Louis is exactly the kind of writer we need right now: honest, fearless and, yes, tough.It was purely fortuitous that I read this book immediately after Susan Hill’s Black Sheep, but they make a beautiful pair. The End of Eddy is heart-crushing, soul-stabbing, astonishing, exhilarating. "Like a cannonball spilled off the side of a ship, Édouard Louis makes straight for the deeps. No one has told this story as eloquently.” -Edmund White, author of A Boy's Own Story " The End of Eddy is lean and poignant and masterfully tells the tale of growing up gay, poor, and bullied. Revelatory, queerly tough, as intellectual as it is impolite, The End of Eddy is a book to shake you up." Justin Torres, author of We the Animals "Èdouard Louis speaks of violence, both social and familiar, with tremendous force and feeling. Louis's remarkably visceral story of growing up queer in working class France quickly transcends its setting precisely because it delivers us into it with such emotional force." -Adam Haslett, author of Imagine Me Gone "A bracingly pitiless account of the psychic and physical violence that lies at the root of masculine identity. The result-a critical and popular triumph-has made him the most celebrated French writer of his generation. Like Karl Ove Knausgaard or Edmund White, Édouard Louis writes from his own undisguised experience, but he writes with an openness and a compassionate intelligence that are all his own. ![]() It is also a sensitive, universal portrait of boyhood and sexual awakening. But from childhood, he was different-“girlish,” intellectually precocious, and attracted to other men.Īlready translated into twenty languages, The End of Eddy captures the violence and desperation of life in a French factory town. Today I’m really gonna be a tough guy.” Growing up in a poor village in northern France, all Eddy Bellegueule wanted was to be a man in the eyes of his family and neighbors. “Every morning in the bathroom I would repeat the same phrase to myself over and over again. About The End of Eddyįarrar, Strauss and Giroux, May 2, 2017, translated by Michael Lucey.Īn autobiographical novel about growing up gay in a working-class town in Picardy. He is the coauthor, with the philosopher Geoffroy de Lagasnerie, of "Manifesto for an Intellectual and Political Counteroffensive", published in English by the Los Angeles Review of Books. He also authored a second novel, Histoire de la violence, and is the editor of a scholarly work on the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. His first novel, The End of Eddy, was an instant best-seller, and got translated into 20 languages. Born Eddy Bellegueule in Hallencourt, France, Édouard Louis is one of the most prominent young voices in the literary French landscape today.
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