It’s 12.33am and I start to write in this dark and silent room. Outside through the open window I hear voices in the night and police sirens in the distance.
I’m 26 years and a few months old; most people would say that my life is ahead of me, that nothing has started yet, but for a long time now I’ve been living with the feeling that I’ve lived too much; I imagine that’s why the need to write is so deep, to fix the past in writing and, I suppose, to get rid of it, or maybe, conversely, the past is so anchored in me now that I’m forced to talk about it, at every moment, on every occasion, maybe it has won out, and by believing I’m getting rid of it I’m only bolstering its existence and its ascendency over my life, maybe I’m trapped – I don’t know.
When I was 21 it was already too late, I’d already lived too much – I’d known misery, poverty in my childhood, my mother asking me time and again to go and knock on the neighbours’ or my aunt’s door with an imploring voice so they’d give us a packet of pasta and a jar of tomato sauce because she had no more money and she knew that a child would be more easily pitied than an adult.
I’d known violence, my cousin who died in prison at 30, my older brother who was sick with alcoholism even as a teenager, who woke up drunk most mornings because his body was so steeped in alcohol, my mother who denied it with all her might to protect her son who swore to us every time he drank that it was the last time, that after that he’d never drink again. The fights in the village cafe, the obsessive racism of rural, isolated communities, underlying every sentence, or even every word. This isn’t France any more, it’s Africa, there’s nothing but foreigners everywhere you look; the constant fear of not making it to the end of the month, not being able to buy wood to heat the house or replace the children’s torn shoes, my mother’s words, I don’t want my kids to be ashamed at school; and my father, sick from a life of working in the factory, on the assembly line, then in the streets sweeping other people’s rubbish, my grandfather sick from the same life, sick because his life was almost an exact replica of his great-grandfather’s, his grandfather’s, his father’s and his son’s: deprivation, precarity, quitting school at 14 or 15, life in the factory, sickness. When I was six or seven I looked at these men around me and I thought that their lives would be mine, that one day I’d go to the factory like them and that the factory would break my back as well.
I’d escaped this fate and worked in a bakery, as a caretaker, a bookseller, a waiter, an usher, a secretary, a tutor, a sex worker, a monitor in a summer camp, a guinea pig for medical experiments. Miraculously, I’d attended what’s considered one of the most prestigious universities in Europe and graduated with a degree in philosophy and sociology, whereas no one else in my family had studied at all. I’d read Plato, Kant, Derrida, De Beauvoir. After growing up among the poorest classes of northern France, I’d got to know the provincial middle classes, their sourness, and then, later on, the Parisian intellectual world, the French and international upper classes. I’d rubbed shoulders with some of the richest people in the world. I’d made love to men who had works by Picasso, Monet and Soulages in their living rooms, who travelled only by private jet and spent their entire time in hotels where one night, one single night, cost what my whole family earned in a year when I was a child, for a family of seven.
I’d been close – physically at least – to the aristocracy, I’d dined at the homes of dukes and princesses, eaten caviar and drunk rare champagnes with them several times a week, spent my holidays in big houses in Switzerland with the mayor of Geneva who’d become my friend. I’d known the life of drug dealers, loved a railway maintenance worker and another man who, at barely 30, had spent a third of his life in prison, and slept in the arms of yet another on an estate reputed to be one of the toughest in France.
At just over 20 I’d changed my first and last names in court, transformed my face, redesigned my hairline, undergone several operations, reinvented the way I moved, walked and talked, and got rid of the northern accent of my childhood. I’d fled to Barcelona to start a new life with a fallen aristocrat, tried to give up everything and move to India, lived in a tiny studio in Paris, owned a huge apartment in one of the richest neighbourhoods in New York, walked for weeks alone across the United States, through unknown, ghostly cities, in an attempt to unravel what my life had become. When I went back to see my father or mother we didn’t know what to say to each other, we no longer spoke the same language, everything I’d experienced in such a short time, everything I’d gone through, everything separated us.
I’d written and published books before I turned 25, and travelled the world to talk about them, to Japan, Chile, Kosovo, Malaysia and Singapore. I’d been asked to speak at Harvard, Berkeley, the Sorbonne. At first this life awed me, then it left me jaded and disgusted.
I’d narrowly escaped death, I’d experienced death, felt its reality, I’d lost the use of my body for several weeks.
More than anything else I’d wanted to escape my childhood, the grey skies of the Nord département and the doomed life of my childhood friends whom society had deprived of everything, their only prospect of happiness being the couple of evenings a week they spent at the village bus stop, drinking beer and pastis in plastic cups to forget, to forget reality. I’d dreamed of being recognised in the street, dreamed of being invisible, dreamed of disappearing, dreamed of waking up one morning as a girl, dreamed of being rich, dreamed of starting all over again.
At times I’d have liked to lie down in a corner, away from everything, to dig a hole, burrow into it and never speak again, never move again, along the lines of what Nietzsche calls Russian fatalism: like those soldiers who, exhausted from fighting, crushed by the fatigue of battle and their pained, heavy bodies, lie down on the ground, in the snow, far from the others, and wait for death to come.
It is this story – this odyssey – that I want to try to tell.
This is an edited extract from Change by Édouard Louis, published on 8 February by Harvill Secker (£18.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
