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, eavesdrops on his sister telling her husband about the crime – and taking issue along the way with the truth of her brother’s account in The End of Eddy, in an ethically knotty narrative about memory and appropriation, not to mention sex, class and race (Édouard’s assailant has Algerian heritage).
It’s something of an understatement to suggest that Louis operates at the sharp edge of autofiction – the man charged with his attack was acquitted on appeal – and his memoirs cut no less close to the bone, navigating in something close to real time how his shift into middle classness, a transition ultimately born of writing about his upbringing, has changed his relationship with his parents.
