The last words of Édouard Louis’s Who Killed My Father are those of his father, spoken shortly before death: ‘You’re right. You’re right – what we need is a revolution.’ On the whole, Louis’s books suggest that for those crushed underfoot by the social and political regime, living without such a revolution is ultimately intolerable. The best label for Louis’s writing is probably autofiction; he rejects the distinction between truth and fiction, the boundary between novel and memoir. His books recount either episodes from his own life (The End of Eddy, History of Violence, Change) or that of his family (Who Killed My Father, A Woman’s Battles and Transformations, Monique s’évade, L’effondrement). L’effondrement (The Collapse), Louis’s latest book, was published in France last October by Seuil, with an English translation forthcoming. Change, his most recently published work in English, came out in 2024, translated by John Lambert.
Change traces Louis’s development as a writer and thinker, starting with his experiences at high school and university in Amiens and his life-changing introduction to fellow French working-class sociologist and author Didier Eribon, then moving to his time at the prestigious École Normale Superior in Paris and the publication of his first novel, The End of Eddy. L’effondrement begins sometime after Change, with Louis now well established as a writer, centring on his estranged older brother’s death from alcohol-related illness. It moves between a present-day narrative in which his family awkwardly comes together to make arrangements and Louis’s own memories of his brother’s life and their shared experiences. These two works will have many familiar elements for those who have read Louis’s other books: Change and L’effondrement contain anguished stories and reflections rendered in simple, paratactic prose that lays bare the social violence beneath the brutalities his family both experiences and inflicts. Change is broad in its thematic scope, telling the story of Louis’s integration into the French bourgeoisie and putting on show a broad variety of social perspectives and feelings. Its narrative centrepiece is its protagonist’s friendship with Elena, who comes from a bourgeois family in Amiens. She and her family introduce him, not without some submerged cruelty, to a different set of cultural codes and a new way of life, but their friendship collapses when he moves from Amiens to Paris leaving her behind. Emotionally, L’effondrement is the numbest of Louis’s books so far; the first sentence sets this up: ‘I felt nothing at the news of my brother’s death; neither sadness, despair, joy, nor pleasure.’ In Louis’s previous works we learn how, as an adult, he repaired relations with his father before his death and became close with his mother when she left her abusive husband and moved to Paris. But with his brother there was no such reconciliation, and Louis’s struggle to remain sympathetic while recounting his brother’s homophobia, racism, far-right politics, and history of committing sexual assault and domestic abuse is one of the book’s core conflicts.
These more recent books also show new developments in Louis’s writing. They have a more poetic flavour and experiment with form, structure, line breaks, and multiple voices. Throughout, there are photographs, numbered lists, stage-dialogues, and single lines in italics that take up whole pages. In L’effondrement, a quote from his brother is printed in bold, surrounded by empty space: ‘I drank to escape and alcohol has become my prison.’ Change is interspersed with old photos and much of the book is addressed to his father, with another second-person singular ‘you’ directed at Elena in the final section. Twice, Louis includes a self-interrogatory question-and-answer section titled ‘Imaginary Conversation in Front of a Mirror’: ‘If you were so different to start out with, how did you come to terms with Elena and her world so fast?’. He delivers the emotional climax of his rupture with Elena by writing her as the speaker of a verse-monologue.
If these stylistic experiments may owe something to Louis’s work as the French translator of avant-garde Canadian poet Anne Carson, Louis’s more obvious predecessors include Simone de Beauvoir, Annie Ernaux, and his close friend Didier Eribon. Their genre of confessional literature goes back to Augustine of Hippo, and specifically Rousseau’s Confessions, where the goal was not to narrate the discovery of God but to record the individual’s crimes and personal failings as a window into human nature. Louis’s works are part of a genre that combines these classical traditions of autobiography with the intellectual legacy of autofictional experiment and French socio-philosophical theory, especially the work of Marcel Mauss.
In many ways, the thrust of French post-war philosophy and theory can be defined by the effort, following Mauss, to de-centre concepts such as truth, identity, and morality and to shift focus to the social structures and processes that shape people’s understandings of these concepts. The invention of sociology was an important strand of the golden age of French theory precisely because Mauss showed what sociology could do. For philosophers like Sartre and Derrida, Mauss’s work was important for the challenge it posed to the notion that society is independent of and prior to anything like laws or the state. But for writers like Louis, Mauss’s most pressing work may be his lecture ‘Techniques of the Body’, in which he develops a new concept of the human being in everyday life. Mauss tells us that we sleep, eat, walk only because we have learned how. As we progress through life, we develop by imitating others and in response to our specific experiences. The very muscles we use, our deeply embodied ways of moving through the world, are not the same; they are shaped by different environments, places, and times.
Mauss gave the social process of learning-how the technical term habitus, which the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu later used to develop into a theory of social class (Louis edited a collective work on Bourdieu in 2013). Among other things, these thinkers tell us, the top and bottom layers of society look, act, walk, talk, and speak differently. Change brings this theory to life: in a memorable scene, Louis tells of how Elena takes it upon herself, one night, to teach him how to eat like her family at the dinner table. Louis reminds us that the process of learning how to become ourselves is where society and politics enters the human being. The environments that make us who we are can constrain or even humiliate and destroy us; if to learn is also to make mistakes, the consequence of these errors can prove fatal, but only for some. In L’effondrement, Louis reflects on the material constraints and opportunities that ground this process of self-invention:
I saw it later in the world of those who live in comfort and money, or at least with more money and comfort, some of their children were like my brother, some drank, some stole, some hated school, some lied, but their parents tried things to help them and attempt to transform them, they offered them training, as a baker, dancer, actor in a bad expensive theatre school, they tried, and that too is injustice, it’s nothing else than the difference of access to failure, it seems to me that injustice is nothing other than the difference of access to attempts, whether they are aborted or successful, and I am so sad, I am so sad.
Our relationship with politics is one of the most intimate of our lives, Louis seems to tell us, seeping into every aspect of our experience. In his books, the less privilege someone has, the more calamitous and unavoidable politics becomes as a matter of life or death. Louis has a fundamentally sociological imagination: he seeks to understand, to convince, to change. What Louis represents is a mode of writing that wears politics on its sleeve even as it confronts us with the complexities of art and genre. It is not hard to mock the excessive ambitions of anyone who would change the world by writing a book. But in our time, it is the notion of literature as somehow apart from or above politics that feels empty, as if it were all just supposed to be another branch of the entertainment industry; relax, enjoy. Joan Didion famously said, ‘We tell ourselves stories in order to live.’ It might be better to say that in order to live, we often invent not stories but silences: bubbles of ignorance where we can pretend the most brutal realities of society do not exist. Louis writes to puncture just these bubbles.
One consequence of living in bubbles is that when we are confronted by violence it can seem shocking and exceptional. By exploiting this fact Louis puts a new twist on the modern tendency towards writing for low attention spans, the sense that an opening must immediately and showily hook the reader. He shocks us with something violent and then gradually shows that what is depicted is nothing surprising after all. Louis’s first book, The End of Eddy, begins: ‘From my childhood I have no happy memories’, and the book’s stories of domestic abuse, fights, and daily brutality are almost casually glossed over, hewing closely to the child’s perspective throughout. In the opening scene of Change, a young and terrified Louis-narrator turns up at the apartment of someone he has agreed to have sex with for money two hours before. He recounts his experience in detail, at one point telling us: ‘The mattress screamed in my place’. Reflecting on the tears that come when he returns home, he says ‘I wasn’t crying because of what had just happened, which wasn’t such a big deal, just the sort of unpleasant thing that can happen to you in any situation; rather, what had just happened allowed me to cry for all the times in my life when I hadn’t cried.’
Louis suggests that what may be hardest to live with about violence is not the initial shock when it occurs but how quickly it becomes natural as our bubbles re-form themselves around it. Change and L’effondrement, where the narrative and authorial voice are virtually one and the same, attempt to strike the difficult pose of neither ignoring nor accepting violence, allowing it to be at once ubiquitous and terrible. The detached tone of L’effondrement is broken at the end by Louis’s younger brother’s description of how his mother, when she was told at the hospital that the doctors were going to pull the plug on her son, condemning him to death, collapsed, damaging her hip against the floor. ‘I did not know,’ he writes, ‘that the love of my mother for my brother was that deep, enough to make her lose consciousness.’ This not-knowing reflects on the kind of knowledge at stake here, what it might mean, perhaps, to have this sort of investment in others. To experience the embodied violence of loss, to so often receive bad news and yet be so much affected by it, to be so concerned with another you lose all bodily control – the difficulties of all this may correspond with the rewards it brings. Or it may not. For most of us, who love only a few people and not exceptionally, we cannot say. Like Louis we would be forced to admit that is ‘one more thing I did not know.’
Louis’s second book, History of Violence, is perhaps his most sustained reflection on an overt act of violence and violation and the sociocultural contexts it occurs in. The book recounts a night on Christmas Eve in which a spontaneous romantic encounter with a man called Reda turns into sexual assault and attempted murder. Louis describes how the police react when they take his statement: ‘Wait—you brought a stranger up to your apartment, in the middle of the night?’ Though Louis tells the police officer that Reda is Kabyle, he continually refers to him as Arab: ‘it was as if I’d given him the confession he’d wanted to hear since I walked in the door, as if I’d given him proof that he was in the right all along; he kept repeating it, “the Arab male, the Arab male,” every other sentence involved “the Arab male.”’ Louis’s statement, ostensibly a way of telling own his side of the story, in fact surrenders his story to the police, who use it to construct a different one, less concerned with upholding the victim’s rights or bringing justice and instead with enforcing a particular version of what happened that does violence to both perpetrator and victim, both Reda and Louis. If society sorts people into roles through careful instruction and embodied repetition, the police ensure them by force: this person is a promiscuous gay man, that one is an Arab male. History of Violence attempts to resist this violence by filtering its central episode through different frames and voices, opening the events up to multiple and contradictory points of view, including Louis’s own account, his sister’s interpretation, the police’s official reconstruction, his friends’ comments on individual details, and Reda’s perspective, left mysterious. The book’s afterlife added another layer of complexity to these themes. Shortly after its publication in 2016, the ‘real’ Reda was arrested on drug offences and linked with the assault of Louis through DNA testing. After a long legal case, in which Reda strenuously denied the charges and Louis refused to participate, declaring that he wished he had never reported the crime and citing his opposition to carceral and retributive justice, Reda’s conviction was reduced to aggravated theft. Reda brought a civil suit against Louis for violating his privacy and presumption of innocence with the publication of History of Violence, requesting damages and that the character’s name be changed in future editions—the case was thrown out of court.
There are many ways to respond to these conflicting stories, but Louis suggests the worst way is the method of the law courts: that is, by constructing a logical but arbitrary master-story of events called ‘what really happened.’ ‘What really happened’ does not exist anymore because the past has disappeared, he reminds us; in the space between different accounts of the event it returns as an absence, a kind of nothing between words that gestures towards people, circumstances, motives, memories. We can understand here something of why Louis chooses to resist labels such as memoir and autobiography, preferring to label his work as fiction or autofiction. The point is not that he is telling lies or seeking to misrepresent his past. It is that the truth/lie distinction does not bring us very far towards understanding memories. And especially not when the theories, agendas, and interpretations of the present are so violently and viscerally inscribed on them.
Read in this context, Change becomes a sustained exploration of his own changing agendas and how they shape the stories he tells around his family. ‘I hated my childhood and I miss my childhood’, he writes. Louis lays out the wrenching paradox that informs all of his books: when he was young all his energy went towards escaping the world in which he grew up, but to achieve this he had to leave behind those he loved and join the ranks of those who live well at their expense. Addressing his father, Louis recalls how, when he was in hospital with peritonitis as a teenager, he brought him news magazines and chocolate:
You weren’t familiar with them, and because you had no idea you bought me staunchly right-wing publications, things I never read, things that Elena’s family had taught me to hold in contempt. (…) That day in my hospital room I realized that maybe, sometimes, you thought about my life, my studies and my future.
Another way of describing Louis’s project in these books, old and new, is as an attempt to forgive both himself and his family, or perhaps simply to love them. But to do this he must grieve for them. Returning to his father’s words about the necessity of revolution, Louis’s works are an ambiguous sort of revolutionary gesture in part because they cannot reverse what is done. The adults in his books cannot return to their childhoods; the dead will not come back to life. His father, his brother, his childhood – it is too late. But he can change their story by rewriting them, turning them from villains into victims, all the while committing to record who the actual villains are: ‘Macron, Hollande, Valls, El Khomri, Hirsch, Sarkozy, Bertrand, Chirac. The history of your suffering bears these names’. In this way, he restores to his family, with all the violence they both endure and perform, with all their thwarted potential, a kind of possibility and indeterminacy that acts as the foundation of human dignity. If a world based on such impossible possibility, such impossible love seems distant, that is beside the point. We need that world, and Change and L’effondrement are faithful to that need even as they show what it means to live in this world instead, how its flaws make us the people we become. The only thing less tolerable than the truth is the duplicitousness and cruelty of our ignorance. Relax. Enjoy.