Biography

At 22, Edouard Louis is student in philosophy and sociology at the “Normal Supérieur”. He took part in the realization of documentary on Michel Foucault for Arte and directed a test entitled Pierre Bourdieu: insubordination in heritage (PUF, 2013)

“My mother spent much time to tell me certain episodes of her life or the life of my father. Her life annoyed her and she spoke to fill the vacuum of this existence, which was only one succession of moments of trouble and exhausting work. She remained housewife a long time, as she asked me to write on official papers. She feels insulted, dirtied by “without profession” printed on my birth certificate. When my little brother and my little sister were mature enough to take care of themselves, she wanted to work. My father found that degrading, as a questioning of his man statute; it was him who was supposed to bring home the pay. She wished it ardently, in spite of the hardness of the job to which she could apply to: the factory worker, cleaning lady or supermarket cashier. She struggled. In a certain way, she also struggled against herself, this imperceptible force, unnameable, which pushed her to think that it was degrading for a woman to work when her husband, him, was cornered into unemployment (my father had lost its work in the factory, I will return there). After long discussions, my father finally accepted and she started to toilet of the elderly, moving from house to house in the village with her rusted bicycle clothed with a red anorak belonging to my father several years back, ate by the mites and obviously (the breadth of my father) too large for her. The women of the village laughed at her: “She has pace, the Bellegueule mother, with her too large anorak.” When one day my mother earned more money than my father, a little more than thousand euros, while him gained hardly seven hundreds, he did not support it any more. He said to her that it was useless and that she was to stop, that we did not need this money. Seven hundred euros for seven would be enough.”

“En finir avec Eddy Bellegueule is a first novel obviously autobiographical […] completely exceptional. A cocktail of Zola, Dickens and Vallès, revisited by Etienne Chatiliez (The one from “Groseille”). Very raw, sometimes insupportable, but also tragicomic, as detached, and never Manichean. ”

(Jean-Claude Perrier, Livre Hebdo, November 15th, 2013)