Change

When I read The End of Eddy by the same author a number of years ago, it blew me away with its intensity. As Louis notes in this work—both are autobiographical memoirs—publishers initially struggled to believe that the words were not fiction. If The End of Eddy focused on the challenges of being homosexual in a deprived northern French town, then Change goes a step further and describes how Louis literally went through a process of metamorphosis to eradicate himself from his prior existence. A disavowal of everything hitherto, when Louis arrived first in Amiens and then in Paris, was necessary both for his becoming a new person and for taking revenge on the prior circumstances of his upbringing that he did not choose. While change (of any sort) can clearly be liberating, it also brought, for Louis—albeit subsequently—a sense of guilt and self-loathing. Louis regularly ponders what it is that might make him truly happy, writing as a form of escapism, a cathartic process to contextualise all that has gone before. I found this work both hard-hitting and compelling. Think of Louis as a French Knausgård.

By Édouard Louis