This week on the NYR Daily: Édouard Louis on fiction and reality, reinventing the self, and writing out of anger

On the NYR Daily this week On Monday, we posted [a powerful excerpt]( from the new book by the French writer Édouard Louis, soon to be published [by New Directions]( in the US as Who Killed My Father. It takes its place as the third in a trilogy of what have generally been called autobiographical novels—though more on that below—about Louis’s harsh upbringing in a working-class village in Northeast France. Colm Toibín [wrote about]( the first of these books, The End of Eddy, in the Review in 2017. Louis’s literary career has been a meteoric rise—it seems stunning that he could still be only twenty-six. Connecting with him was a little complicated this week as he criss-crossed Europe doing talks and readings, and we corresponded rather than spoke. Even in email, there is a touching sweetness and informal courtesy to all his communications—his answers to my questions came signed off: “Sending love from the Zurich–Paris TGV.” Because Édouard Louis took this trouble of writing carefully composed, rounded answers for us, I’m departing from this newsletter’s usual practice and respecting his express wish to reproduce his responses in full and unedited—and with some French punctuation preserved, too. Forgive the extra length, but to me, this is no hardship since I love his writing. I hope you agree. —Matt Seaton, Editor * I asked, first, about how he saw this porous boundary between novel and memoir. He wrote: “The situation in France is quite different than in the US. We have fewer literary categories than you do; we don’t have «nonfiction» for example, and we mostly use the term «memoir» for autobiographies of politicians. “For me, novel means construction, literary construction, and I don’t believe that construction necessarily leads to fiction. A sociologist like Pierre Bourdieu built graphics, for example, so it’s typically an act of construction, but these constructions make you more aware of reality than just being in the street and looking around you. (If you look around you in Manhattan, you don’t see reality; you see mostly a small part of reality: white and rich people.) “I truly believe that our societies work by a constant effort to not see reality. There is another scene I often recount: it was when Jean-Luc Godard was receiving an honorary César in the 1980s or in the 1990s, during the Césars ceremony in France. Godard was invited to go on the stage set for the ceremony, in order to receive his César, given that night by Isabelle Huppert. So he went on the stage. All the people in the room, dressed in tuxedos and expensive dresses, were expecting him to deliver a speech in which he would thank his producers, his screenwriters, eventually his mother, as people always do in this kind of situation. But instead, Jean-Luc Godard said, more or less: I would like to thank the telephone operator who works for Gaumont, the cleaning women, etc. And suddenly, the audience laughed. If you thank a screenwriter, everybody thinks it’s moving, but if you thank a cleaning woman, people think it’s funny. Godard was making an important statement about the system that sustains the art milieu; he was underlining the fact that, when you make a piece of art, a movie, there are some people who clean the studio for you, some people who stay ten hours a day in an office to answer the telephone for you. “The situation is the same when you are a writer: you are invited to give a lecture, your publishing house pays for a hotel room for you, and someone in this room cleans your bed, cleans your bathroom. It’s all a system. So when Godard pointed out the way this system works, people laughed as if it was a joke. I saw their laughter as a kind of physical, bodily response in order not to be confronted by what Godard said. Their laughter was a strategy to escape reality, to not see a structurally violent situation. “So when I write, I ask myself, How can I prevent people from escaping what I’m trying to show? And I think autobiography can be a tool to force people to see reality, because when you do autobiography, you say: Look, this is what is happening now, this body I talk about is suffering now, while you read. That’s why there is such an avant-garde and important autobiographical movement in literature today, at a world level, with Ocean Vuong, Karl Ove Knausgaard, Svetlana Alexievich, etc.” * Photo by Arnaud Delrue For my second question, I asked him about something he described in The End of Eddy, his decision to change his name: “I changed my name because a name is not only a name, it’s not only a succession of sounds and letters, but a name is a story, a History. And my name, the name I was born with, Eddy Bellegueule, was a name of a History I didn’t want anymore. “I was born gay in a very small post-industrial village in the North of France, where masculinity and homophobia were the most powerful «values»; it was more than values, it was the oxygen itself, it was the language. “It’s a very—unfortunately—banal story: during all my childhood I was called faggot, pussy, queer, pansy. I didn’t have real friends at school, and my father would often tell me «Why are you like that? Why are you so effeminate? Because of you we are ashamed; people in the village call us the family of the faggot.» “So when I grew up, each time someone pronounced my name, Eddy Bellegueule, I had the impression that this person was telling me queer, shame, faggot. I couldn’t see the difference between the insult and my name. “When I moved to Paris and started to write, I decided to change my name. I went to court, it took years and years. The day I got my new passport with my new name, Édouard Louis, it was the most beautiful day of my life, I was walking down the street and I was repeating to myself, Your name is Édouard Louis now, your name is Édouard Louis, I have the name of my freedom, I have the name of my reinvention. “I would love people to read my books, The End of Eddy, History of Violence, and Who Killed My Father, like three manifestos for the reinvention of the self, for self-fashioning. Because, deeply, it’s what it’s about.” * Finally, I noted that, besides his creative writing, Louis had also published works on Pierre Bourdieu and Michel Foucault. I was curious about what he took from these thinkers. He replied: “Pierre Bourdieu and Michel Foucault taught me something very important: that there is no truth without anger. That anger is a key to understand our world(s), that it’s maybe even the most scientific tool human beings invented. “If I take a concrete example, my mother had to face, during all her life, extreme difficulties: poverty, precarity, male domination, and male violence. She wanted to wear make-up but my father didn’t want her to; he would say that make-up was for sluts (sic). During twenty years of her life, she endured this masculine violence, but most of the time, when she was talking about herself, she would say: But my life is OK, it could be worse, I cannot complain. Why so? Because her mother and her grandmother before her, and her daughters endured the same violence. This violence became so systematic, it was so present around her, that she ended up thinking that it was «normal». That’s a tragedy; how can you change the world if violence is so systematic that people end up not seeing it anymore? “Only if you are angry you understand that this violence is not normal. Anger is what allows you to take a step back and to understand the social structure you are stuck in. Bourdieu’s and Foucault’s books are full of rage, and so are my books, I hope.” For everything else we’ve been publishing, visit the [NYR Daily](, and send your comments and reactions to: daily@nybooks.com. You are receiving this message because you signed up for email newsletters from The New York Review. [Update preferences]( The New York Review of Books 435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014 [Unsubscribe](