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Édouard Louis: The Interview

“Everything is connected: masculinity, social class, and violence.”

Means Happy

10 Feb 2025 — 14 min read

One of the most popular and acclaimed French writers of our time, Édouard Louis doesn't want to sell books, he wants to have an impact on the world.

In his first book, Édouard Louis shed light on what it was like to leave a poor French neighbourhood where he was abused as a gay boy. In subsequent volumes, he has explored various aspects of his life - within the context of homophobia, politics, and masculinity.

Adam Andras Kanicsar interviewed Édouard Louis for Humen magazine - an LGBTQ publication in Hungary.

I don't know how well you know Hungarian politics, but in recent years it has become particularly difficult to publish books on LGBTQ topics. It's a small miracle that your books are available in Hungary. How does it feel to know about a country in Central Europe where it's almost illegal to publish an Édouard Louis book?

For me, this is what literature and culture are about – tools of rebellion. It means a lot to me that my books can contribute something in a violent political situation. It means a lot when people are fighting to keep these topics alive in public discourse, because homosexuality is life itself. It means the lives of many people: their bodies, their desires, their identities, their flesh. And it is simply absurd when a political system wants to erase a form of life. Sure, they can always try to hurt people or try to stop people, but in the end they can never really succeed. Because you simply cannot erase bodies, desires, lives.

It is violent and harmful when they want to annihilate queer existence, but fundamentally the whole situation is rather ridiculous, because it will not succeed.

For me, this is also one of the roles of literature: it can recall the truth when it has been erased.

The problem with the heavy and weighty topics such as you discuss is that it often seems that those who read about them are already fundamentally open to the LGBTQ community. Those who prefer to support the offensive views of the other side are not really going to pick up your books. It's a complicated situation: people believe in the power of queer literature, but at the same time, lighter literature still reaches larger audiences. Does high-brow literature have a harder time making an impact?

You're absolutely right. That's a tough question. There are a few things to consider.

First, being successful and having an impact are not the same thing. You can create something that might be successful, but it doesn't necessarily change people. There are books that sell millions of copies but have no real impact on their readers: they just flow through them without leaving any trace. The impact of a book isn't always about how many people read it.

Take neoliberalism as an example. How many people have actually read Milton Friedman or Friedrich Hayek, who were key figures in the creation of neoliberalism? Very few. Yet their ideas have completely reshaped the world, sometimes violently and unequally. It's a perfect, yet frightening, example of how not everything needs to be widely read to have a significant impact on the world.

My goal is not to sell millions of copies of my books, but for my books to have an impact on the world. Some people may find my work too sexual, too violent, too scientific, but I can't write a book that makes everyone happy and I'm fine with that. Because that's not the goal.

We also need to acknowledge that we are not going to change anyone. A person who, for example, passionately believes in Orbán already has their own belief system. Culture is not always about changing people's thinking, but about creating new generations who are influenced by the work. When Simone de Beauvoir wrote The Second Sex , she didn't convince any right-wingers who thought women belonged in the home. But she did shape a new generation of thinking people who carried her ideas forward.

When I was studying The Second Sex , I noticed that the right-wingers were going crazy about the book; they were saying that it would destroy humanity and culture - exactly what they are saying about LGBTQ rights and feminism today. Since then, the rhetoric of the right-wing has not evolved much, but the language of the left-wing movements has evolved a lot since the 1950s. In other words, while de Beauvoir did not change her conservative contemporaries, she did help shape a new generation that embraced her ideas. And that's what culture does - it doesn't always convince people, but it shapes new voices and brings together people who previously had no common platform.

Related to this is that having an impact is also about initiating conversations. But these conversations often feel one-sided, because the people involved already have a point of view that they are committed to. It seems that to have an impact, we need to think holistically. For example, your books talk about family, childhood, gayness, financial hardship, providing a new perspective on what it means to be a queer child or a parent of a queer child. Perhaps these people can be reached through another, shared burden: like the topic of poverty.

Absolutely. For me, a form of resistance is to create our own narratives and not get trapped in the problems that others define—especially conservatives. What conservatives have done very well in recent years is to dominate the conversation. Even if they haven't always won elections, they've gotten our attention by framing the questions that everyone else is trying to answer. Is immigration dangerous? Are LGBTQ rights dangerous to our society? These are their questions, and even if we try to resist, we still let them shape the narrative.

In the 70s and 80s, the left was the one who was asking the questions. About access to abortion, LGBTQ rights, and other progressive issues. At that time, it was the conservatives who were rushing to respond.

Now we're seeing the opposite. Conservatives are asking whether migrants are the problem or whether Islam is a threat, and we're spending our time answering instead of setting the agenda ourselves.

For me, writing means creating my own language and answering my own questions, rather than answering theirs - like in the book about my father, where I explore how homophobia is tied to class.

My father expressed his masculinity, tried to express that he was a “real man,” by rejecting the power position of the school. In rejecting the system, he also closed himself off from a lot of opportunities, which left him with difficult and poorly paid jobs. It’s all connected: masculinity, class, and violence.

So when people make the criticism that the left only talks about sexuality and not about class issues, I think they're oversimplifying the situation. The two are deeply connected. When you fight homophobia, you might be fighting class oppression without realising it. It's a lot more complex than it might seem.

In Who Killed My Father? you mention that writing helps you process. How difficult is it to write about the people around us in front of a wide audience?

First of all, autobiography is the least egotistical form of writing. When I write about my life, I write about a life that I did not choose. I did not choose my family, the circumstances into which I was born, my name, my siblings. When I write, I discover how these structures—family, national identity, class—have shaped me, all of which I had no control over.

On the other hand, when you write a novel, you control everything – you decide about the characters, their names, their religion, what country they live in. To me, it feels much more personal. I love fiction, I read a lot of fiction. But this genre is much more personal to me than an autobiography.

Autobiography is about dissolving yourself in a society that you didn't choose. It's about trying to understand that you're just a tiny part of a huge structure that you have no control over. So in a way, autobiography is not about me - it's about understanding the forces that shape us all.

When I tried to write fiction, I was suffocating because there was just too much of me on every page. I had to make so many decisions: I was in control of everything, and I didn't like that feeling. But when I write about my own life, I can allow myself to dissolve into the structures I'm writing about.

The power of autobiographies is in the impact they have. I said before that I want to write literature that has an impact. When you write an autobiography, people can't escape what you're saying. There's a certain energy to it, knowing that what you're reading really happened. It creates a kind of uneasy, urgent feeling: people can't look away from it because they know it's all true and it might be happening right as they're reading it. They can't turn their heads away, they can't look away.

For me, that's very valuable. I've noticed that in people who don't want to know about certain things in the world, autobiographical works can awaken an aggression that fiction can't. They feel terribly uncomfortable with the fact that what you think is the truth. And they'll always try to prove the opposite. They'll always try to prove that "that's not really the case."

There is a power of confrontation in the whole situation that overrides a lot of things. I am aware that I may be putting myself in danger by writing everything down. I may be putting my family in danger. But I think it is worth it. The confrontation that this whole thing creates is worth the risk.

Sometimes I find myself in situations where people are almost begging me to tell them that what I have written is not the whole truth. They come up to me in bookstores and on the street because there is a bit of fiction in what I have written. It is as if fiction is a safety net, protecting them from having to see certain situations in their full clarity, just like they would turn their heads away when they see a homeless person on the street because they don't want to face the fact that the world can be ugly. There is a power of autobiographical works that provokes, and that is why I continue to write in this way.

Don't you sometimes feel very vulnerable because of these books? People knowing your traumas, your mother's traumas, your father's traumas?

Autobiographical works are inherently risky - sometimes I pay the price for that risk. When people attack your book, they attack you. Your stories, which they also question. There is a terrible violence in the whole situation. But I can only repeat myself: the political power of the whole situation is so strong that in the end, all this risk is worth it.

Autobiographical works begin with taking risks. If you write about your own life without that, it simply isn't autobiographical. There are many such works: memoirs of politicians or pop stars, which are called memoirs, but I wouldn't call them autobiographical works, because these writings talk about what society expects of you when you have to talk about yourself. "I was born in the countryside. My grandmother made me delicious pies, and then we went for a walk by the sea."

Fairy tales?

Exactly. And from that point on, they're not autobiographical. They're sociobiographies. An unconscious, collective way of talking about yourself that society forces on people as a way of talking about themselves. And that's not how people actually talk about themselves. For me, autobiographical writing is autobiographical writing when you say something that society doesn't want you to say. That's when this certain risk begins.

If something has to be personal, it has to be personal. And what we think of as personal today is actually defined as personal by our society itself, our society determines what counts as personal, because the boundary between public and personal is historical and social.

Five hundred years ago, it was very difficult to talk about sexuality. Today, it's easier. What is considered personal is constantly being shaped. And if something is personal, it's because our society has made it so, and since then, talking about it is a fundamental risk. And if what you're talking about isn't risky to talk about, it doesn't hold any potential for development.

Sure, it makes me vulnerable a lot. I find myself in difficult situations a lot because of it. But if you feel that way, it means you might be in a really resistant position right now. And that's a good sign. It's okay if the struggle hurts. Pain is part of the struggle.

Does your relationship with your books change over time?

On one level, that's why I keep writing - because my perceptions are constantly changing. Just like the people I'm talking about are changing. Book after book, I try to create a kind of map of the working class through my family.

Each volume shows a different aspect of reality. I show masculinity through my childhood, politics through my father, the situation of women through my mother. The books are both portraits and building blocks of this map.

French literature had a similar period, when, for example, Balzac or Zola, through their works, built an entire world piece by piece. I love this idea and I regret that this effort has disappeared from literature: to create dimensions, to somehow connect all the books.

It's nice to show how much people change. It's also a perception that working-class people don't change, they just sit on their sofas in their little houses day after day. When I started writing, that assumption was actually there in me, because that's what I thought when I ran away from my family. I had the arrogance of a class traitor.

I thought I was changing, but they weren't. And maybe that thought gave me the strength to escape: I thought I wasn't like them, and I would prove it to them. Of course, I see now that these realities are much more complex than that.

My mother left my father after twenty years. I never thought this would happen. That's why I wanted to write about her. She packed up all her belongings, as I write in the book, and after twenty years together, she threw everything in the trash. For twenty years, she listened to him tell her to cook, to shut up, to raise the child, to clean up after the child. Then one day she suddenly ran away. She threw everything out the window, locked the door behind her, and told my father never to come back. Then she started a new life.

Book by book, I try to understand how people are locked into their own lives, and yet how much they thrive in this confined space. All of this serves to show the changes that occur in people's lives.

Is it difficult for you to write about the working class when you have already distanced yourself from it?

Even if I wanted to escape being working class, it's not that easy. Maybe that's also part of the class experience or the violence inherent in social classes.

Two years ago, my brother died of alcoholism. He was 38. When he died, I had to travel back to the North of France to help my mother, whose son had died: I had to help organise it, pay for the funeral, take care of him.

Last year, my mother suddenly couldn't walk. She had bathed and lifted old people all her life, and then at the age of fifty, she suddenly couldn't walk. We had to go to the hospital together, we had to do everything together afterwards.

My other brother lost his house a few months ago because he couldn't pay the mortgage. I had to help him find a new house.

In a way, I'm still connected to that reality, to a degree that goes beyond me. When you escape your own social background, you never really escape it completely. You face a lot of situations that are foreign to my friends who were born into a much more privileged situation.

That's what I'm trying to write about in my book and in my book about my mother. The complexity of class structure is not just about whether you belong to this class or that class, but also about the fact that when you move from one class to another, you can't completely cut the ties between you and the class you were born into. Because it hurts you. Because it's part of you. Inequality stays with you, even if you try to run away from it.

Sure, it's not as much a part of my life as it was, for example, when I was a child. But there's still a part of it that you can't get rid of.

How can we triumph over a social class when it is not only a material reality but also a kind of spirit that haunts you, that no matter how fast you run from it, it is still there behind you? This is what I try to understand in my book.

That is why it is typical that many people who have jumped a social class in their lives feel a deep melancholy, because they have never really been able to completely break away from where they wanted to leave. They are no longer part of the world they came from and they are not part of the new one either.

Originally published by Humen Magazine - republished with permission