Édouard Louis: “Violence Carries the Risk of Its Own Destruction”
In June, the French writer Édouard Louis spent a few days in Ljubljana, where he gave two public talks. During one of our conversations, I pressed record and tried to focus on the form of an interview. The recording stayed untouched on my phone for months, while I was struggling with my own writing and depression — something not unfamiliar to Louis either.
However, a year after our first conversation in Berlin, and following the publication of Collapse (L’Effondrement), a book about his brother’s death, I was most interested in how he feels now that the family saga — which he’s been writing for the past ten years across several books — has finally come to an end. So that’s where we began.
After ten years of writing about your family — of writing the family saga — you’re now on the other side. How does that feel? I think I saw you wrote somewhere, it was in French, so I’m not sure I got it right — you said you would never use the word “family” again?
It makes me feel incredibly good — much better than I ever expected when I was on the other side. When I was writing the book about my brother and his death, I couldn’t wait to be on the other side. But I didn’t yet know how good it would make me feel, how liberated it would make me feel. For two reasons. The first is that it was a particularly difficult book to write — not because I loved him, not because it made me sad, but because, in fact, I didn’t love him. And that’s one of the subjects of the book: what it means to try to understand someone you didn’t love — someone you even hated — and to work through that kind of contradiction.
You’re very good at understanding people you don’t like — even people who hated you, or were violent towards you.
Yeah, but with my brother it was quite extreme — because my brother was a very, very violent person. Compared to him, my father was like a little flower.
My brother used to beat women — he would punch them in the face. After his death, I called them — all of them, one after the other — to try to understand who he was, to know more about the person he had been.
My brother used to beat women — he would punch them in the face. After his death, I called them — all of them, one after the other — to try to understand who he was, to know more about the person he had been. And they told me terrible stories. He was homophobic. Sometimes he would beat up gay people just for fun — he would stand near a gay bar and wait for them. He voted for the far right in a very extreme, very ideological way. My father voted for the far right because he felt no one cared about him; but my brother was driven by ideology.
So I really hated him. And that’s why this book was so hard to write — not because it was sad, but because of the contradiction at its heart: what it means to go really deep into understanding someone you hated.
When he died, he was 38. I hadn’t seen him for ten years, hadn’t spoken to him for ten years. I was calling those women, and they kept telling me these terrible things. And while I was doing that, my family started to threaten me. My sister didn’t want me to write this book. She told me: You can’t say in public that our brother was an alcoholic and that he beat women.
Because it would bring shame on the family?
Yeah, because it would bring shame on the family. And because, you know how families are — they lie to each other so much that they end up believing the lies are true. My sister was calling me, telling me that he was a very loving, very sweet person. And I told her: I just talked to three women this weekend — he was beating them.
So this conflict made everything difficult. And the other reason why it was so hard — and why I feel so relieved now — is that I realize how much I wasn’t free in the way I had to write these stories. I had to. I had to. I had to push this saga to its end. I had to try to show all the aspects of this working-class milieu I grew up in: the women’s side, the bullying side, the gay side of my childhood. In a way, it wasn’t about freedom. I was suffering. That’s why I feel relieved now — because it was my body that made me feel obliged to write about it.
You write because your body demands you to write.
Exactly. This is what comes with a lot of autobiographical writing. I don’t remember if we talked about it, but recently, for me, a very interesting example of that was the writer Salman Rushdie. Because Rushdie, throughout his whole life, wrote fiction — he was a kind of master of fiction. He wrote these incredibly novelistic books with so many characters. The Satanic Verses is a book that was so controversial — it’s an incredible work. It even starts with bodies falling from the sky, from an airplane. Incredible, incredible fiction.
And he was also a theorist of fiction — he talked about it a lot in interviews, about how important fiction is. And yet, twice in his life, he wrote an autobiography. The first time was when the fatwa was declared against him and he had to go into hiding — he wrote a book called Joseph Anton, about his life in hiding, living under threat of death. And the second autobiography he wrote was his last book, The Knife, about when he was the victim of a terrorist attack. So this master of fiction, this theorist of fiction, twice in his life — in the face of extreme violence — had no choice but to write an autobiography. For me, that was a very interesting moment — like a kind of laboratory, you know?
Like a study of literature as a project — as something that responds to life when fiction is no longer possible.
Exactly. And the connection between violence and autobiography — how sometimes it gives you no choice but to write about it. In a way, I was a prisoner. But in another way, I’m glad I was. I’m glad I was a prisoner of those stories.
I was a prisoner. But in another way, I’m glad I was. I’m glad I was a prisoner of those stories.
Because the beautiful thing about it is that violence is always at risk — because if violence pushes people to speak about violence, then violence carries within itself the risk of its own destruction. Violence pushes some people — it leaves them no choice but to write about it, to talk about it, to testify. And then violence is like one of those viruses: you extract a tiny piece of it, and you make a vaccine out of it. It left me no choice, but because I had no choice, I had to find a cure against it.
Which book about violence was the most difficult for you to write? I imagine… actually, it’s hard to imagine what it must have been like for you. But how were you able to write History of Violence? Was that the one that was the hardest to write — or…?
No, strangely, no. I mean, it was very difficult — every book was difficult in its own way. Eddy was hard because it was my first one. I didn’t know how to do it. I wasn’t sure anyone would publish it, and I wasn’t sure anyone would read it. I always thought I would fail. Technically, the most difficult one was Change. It took me five years to write Change. And in between, I wrote other, smaller books — like Who Killed My Father. But The Collapse — the one about my brother, was very difficult because my family was threatening me. And because… I talked about this last time, at dinner with your shrink [Borut Škodlar]. The book about my brother was complicated because I realized that all the sociological language I usually use in my books didn’t work for him — not completely, at least. If I wanted to understand this guy’s story, I had to understand depression. I had to understand melancholy. So I kept rewriting the book, again and again, for years — and it just didn’t work. The book was bad, and I didn’t know why. It wasn’t only a question of style — although, of course, there’s always the issue of finding the right tone for each book — but this one just wasn’t good.
Didier always rereads my books, and I reread his, and we give each other advice. And there was this terrible moment — maybe two years ago — we were at the opening of a big Sophie Calle exhibition in Paris. That day, Didier had just finished rereading a draft of the book about my brother. And I remember the setting — we were surrounded by Sophie Calle’s pieces — and Didier told me, “It’s not good. The book isn’t working. There’s something that doesn’t work. I don’t know what, but it doesn’t. It’s not as strong as your other books.”
I remember feeling so heavy that day. Everything around me became like background noise, background voices. I couldn’t even look at Sophie’s work. There’s a scene like that in In Search of Lost Time, when someone rereads the narrator’s pages and tells him, “It’s not good.” And everything collapses. It’s mysterious — how heavy that kind of moment can be.
So what was it that you needed to figure out? Did you need to find a new frame of thought?
The thing is, I needed a different theoretical frame — a more psychiatric and psychological one — and that was something I really didn’t know.
It makes sense that you spoke with my shrink — you’ve become more interested in the psychiatric approach now.
We talked about a book by Michel Foucault Didier bought me — a book Foucault wrote about a Swiss, or German-Swiss, psychiatrist named Ludwig Binswanger, who wrote extensively about depression. Foucault was very interested in him because Foucault himself was a very depressed person. When he was a student, he tried to kill himself several times — he had a lot of issues. I read that book, and suddenly I thought: Oh my God, this is the kind of framework I need for my brother. And then, for a whole year, I read everything — all the Freud I could read, all the Winnicott I could read, all of Anna Freud, Freud’s daughter, all of Julia Krsteva. I read so many of them. And it gave me a completely different frame.
Because the thing is, when I started writing this book, I thought: The story of my brother is the story of someone who pushed social determinism so far that he died at 38 from alcohol. But then I realized — people from my childhood, people from the social class I grew up in, didn’t die at 38, you know? It didn’t happen that often.
People would work at the factory and eventually die at sixty or sixty-five — still young for factory workers. But my brother, by the age of twenty-five, was already turning yellow because his liver was destroyed.
Yeah, it is extreme.
People would work at the factory and eventually die at sixty or sixty-five — still young for factory workers. But my brother, by the age of twenty-five, was already turning yellow because his liver was destroyed. His skin was yellow, he was losing his teeth, losing his hair. And there was something there that went beyond my usual frame. I realized there was something else. So I spoke to the woman he was living with. And one of the things these women told me was that my brother had always dreamed so big — all his life.
That was the case with Peter Handke’s mother too — we talked about that. And about Ivan Cankar’s mother. Cankar’s mother, in her time, couldn’t dream big; there were no dreams to be fulfilled. But Handke’s mother could dream — yet she couldn’t reach those dreams, and so she killed herself. Cioran has this great thought: that only optimists commit suicide, precisely because they are optimists. Because why would someone who has no reason to live have any reason to die?
It’s so true. He was killing himself gradually. I remember this from my childhood — my brother wanted to be the person who would fix the cathedral of Notre-Dame in Paris. And he dreamed of opening a big butcher shop. His dream was to be a butcher. He used to say, “Madonna will come to my butcher shop, and international newspapers will write about it.” In my childhood, because we were so poor and deprived of everything, our dreams were like little escapes — What if I win the lottery? What would I buy? Those were just glimpses of escape. But my brother — he really believed in his dreams, so practically. When he said he wanted to become Madonna’s butcher, he actually went to a butcher shop to become an apprentice. His dreams were very practical, very real. And one of the things I realized — exactly as you were saying — is that one of the many forms of violence in my childhood was how social violence framed our dreams. Violence also had the power to frame our imagination. Most of our dreams were about buying a bigger TV, a bigger car. It’s as if the social milieu my brother lived in failed to frame his dreams — his dreams were too big. And so the story of his life became the clash between those dreams that were too big, and the social world with all its impossibilities and limitations. He died out of his dreams.
Why did society fail to frame his dreams?
It’s because there was something in him — something society couldn’t completely explain — this kind of unknown force coming from within him. Suddenly having a different theoretical frame also gave me a different way of writing — a different pace, a different style, a different aesthetic. Because the frame changes everything. I had to rewrite the whole book. And finally, I think I found the tone that was the most fair to that story.
Maybe, in a way, I have the same illness my brother had, you know? My dreams were also so big. I was also sick from life. As you know, I can’t live without antidepressants; my life is very unstable in a way.
Do you think it was also hard on him because you made it?
Yes, but in a very strange way. Probably — probably, yes. Him having such big dreams, and then seeing what my life suddenly became — a life of traveling, of having privileges, of doing everything he couldn’t do — that was probably also very violent.
Maybe, in a way, I have the same illness my brother had, you know? My dreams were also so big. I was also sick from life. As you know, I can’t live without antidepressants; my life is very unstable in a way.
But one day Didier told me something very beautiful, while we were having a drink — like the one we’re having now. He said: “You have two depressed sons in a family — and the straight one becomes an alcoholic, and the gay one becomes an artist.” And it’s so beautiful, because it says so much about society — about how our states of mind were maybe very similar, but because I was gay and he was straight, we were pushed in different directions. Maybe something deep inside us was the same.
I didn’t talk to him for ten years. I didn’t want to. My mother was always trying to bring us back together. She kept telling me, “Please, talk to him.” But I didn’t want to. And then, when I called one of the women he had lived with, she told me that when he was drunk, he would talk about me — and he would say that he was so proud of my achievements. He would say things like: “A boy like my brother — you find one in maybe ten thousand, or a hundred thousand families.” He would say those things. But I didn’t know that. I only discovered it later.
So in a way, he admired you?
Yeah, but as you know, contradictory feelings can coexist. It’s what Annie Ernaux described in her book about her parents — when she suddenly went off to study and began another life. Her parents were both angry — thinking, She believes she’s better than us — and at the same time incredibly proud of her. Those feelings coexisted. I don’t know if those feelings coexisted within my brother, but I think they might have. And there’s also another aspect — the political one — which is the attempt to understand people who are terrible. Today, I think the dominant political practice is to exclude them. There’s a strong urge not to understand violence in contemporary politics — even among supposedly left-wing movements. Let’s put people in jail. Let’s judge people. Let’s cancel people.
What is it that escapes us when we think only through a sociological framework? But then again, even psychology, philosophy, and neuroscience don’t give us all the answers about the human condition.
Yeah, it’s strange — the unexplainable. It’s very bizarre. You know, when my brother was a kid, he had a sister — my sister — from my mother’s first marriage. And when my mother divorced that man, before meeting my father, my brother went crazy about it. He would skip school to try to find his father, and he was always talking about him. And his sister — my sister — in the same family, in the same place, in the same region, in the same generation — she didn’t care. Why? How does that happen? So, in the same context, in the same family — where does it come from? It’s a book full of mystery, because human beings are full of mysteries. But what’s interesting is how even the most mysterious things always interact with society. As Didier was saying — if you put depression in a certain sexual context, in a certain gender context, in a certain social-class context — it can take completely different meanings. And Peter Handke’s mother — she killed herself also because she was living in a particular moment in history, and also because she was a woman. That made everything more complicated. So, in a way, even if there are things that are born outside of society, they are always taken back into society anyway, I think.
Do you know in which direction you’ll go after this book?
I don’t know. I have a few smaller projects — kind of transitions for me — before the next saga. Right now I’m working on a book with Nan Goldin — about art, photography, and literature. It’s a mix of conversations, images, and many things. But for the next novels… I’d actually like to write about sexuality.
In what way? Are you celebrating a kind of liberation from the family theme?
Yes. In the last couple of years, we’ve been talking a lot about violence in sexuality — which is very important, and we still need to do it. I’ve written a lot about sexual violence — about rape, about sexual violence against people like my sister, my mother… I think it’s an infinite task, because these issues are always there. But the fact that we talk about these things should not make us forget that sexuality can also be a utopia. And that the fight against sexual violence should never become a fight against sexuality itself. I think all the beautiful, liberating aspects of sexuality that people talked about in the 1960s and 70s — in May ’68, when some women were saying “I want to have as much sex as I want, like men do,” and so on — have disappeared a little.
It’s funny, because the idea came to me from Roland Barthes’s book A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments (Fragments d’un discours amoureux). Barthes wrote that book in the context of the 1960s and 70s, when there was a strong movement of sexual liberation. At that time, people were saying that love, couples, and passion were actually conservative — that they were imposed by capitalism, which wanted to put people into couples and houses so they’d have more time to work and contribute to the system. There was this big idea — part of what we call Freudo-Marxism — of philosophers bringing Freud and Marx together. In some interviews, Barthes said that love had become lonely; no one wanted to talk about love anymore, because everyone thought it was conservative. Barthes, of course, knew that. He didn’t disagree that love had been captured by capitalist society — through marriage, domestic life, buying your little house with your little dog, and all that. So he wasn’t naïve. But he was saying that just because we know that doesn’t mean we should completely erase love. And in a way, that’s the same gesture I would like to make with sexuality. Of course, I agree with the fight against sexual violence — but it shouldn’t erase the beauty of sexuality itself. So maybe that’s the project. But you know how it goes with books — maybe I’ll end up doing something completely different. It’s just an idea for now.
Sometimes, in a certain context — and today, I think — talking about love, and sex, and desire, and passion, and lust can be extremely subversive.
Interesting, I came to the same conclusion — I want to write about love and connection. I was going through Susan Sontag’s notes — they’re scattered around — but there’s this part where she writes how her novel should begin: “All my life I have been looking for someone intelligent to talk to.” I took that sentence and made it the beginning of the novel about love I’m working on.
Beautiful.
I came to this idea — that I need to write about love — because of this feeling that the world as we know it is ending, you know? And I think that should change our aesthetic and ethical choices. Sometimes being political means adding something beautiful to a world in ruins.
Absolutely. Absolutely. Yes — what is political is always moving, always changing. And you know, it’s one of the ideas of Pierre Bourdieu, in his books about literature — when he says that many left-wing people today criticize the movement of l’art pour l’art, art for art’s sake. They say it was born at the end of the 19th century, around writers like Flaubert, who said that a novel should be about nothing. But in fact, Bourdieu said that this movement was extremely political — because it was a way of breaking free from the expectations of the bourgeoisie, of creating a complete independence for writers outside society. So, of course, what is political always changes. Sometimes, in a certain context — and today, I think — talking about love, and sex, and desire, and passion, and lust can be extremely subversive.
And sex, desire, music, writing — they’re always better when the world as we know it is ending. (laughter)
Yes, exactly.
Everything tastes better with a bit of catastrophe. (laughter) I think we need to write about love in a truly radical way — to push it to its limits, to find out what it really means to love.
Exactly. For example, in France — but not only in France — in the last few years, because of all the political movements, there has been a lot of criticism of age differences in love. People say it’s a matter of power, and that… But for me, to hear that is extremely violent, because when I arrived in Paris as a young gay man, I wanted to meet older men — men who would help me, who would protect me. And today, I could just say, Oh my God, they were taking advantage of their power. But it’s not true, because…
It was an exchange of power.
Yes, my power was my youth. My power was the fascination with youth in our society — something we can criticize, of course, something we can challenge — but it exists. And at that time, it gave me power. I know so many older gay men who would lose everything for a nineteen-year-old boy. They would sell their house, lose their job — for twinks, for the desires they had. It’s exactly what you were saying — that something can be political at one moment, and not at another, or in another context.
It’s the same with power. Every context in life, every situation in life, has completely different mechanisms of power.
And maybe sex doesn’t work the same way as the rest of society. When I was eighteen, I had so much power. When I walked into a gay bar, everyone looked at me. Everyone wanted to have sex with me. And now, when I walk in — I’m thirty-three — people look at me differently. I’m not saying people don’t look at me anymore or anything like that, but in a way, I’ve lost a certain kind of power.
That’s a whole other big subject.
But what I mean is that — especially in our own field, on the left — we tend to apply too easily the categories of the rest of society to the sexual sphere, where things can happen differently.
Maybe some people fetishized me because I was working class — you know, it made them want to have sex with me. But that’s not the same as being working class.
Because they are not completely connected to class violence?
They can be — they are sometimes connected, you know. When I first arrived in Paris, I would go to gay bars, and my teeth were rotten because, as a working-class kid, I had never been to the dentist. I remember one gay guy telling me, “Oh, your teeth look like a dog’s. You look like a dog.” But I think it’s much more complex than what we tend to say today. Maybe some people fetishized me because I was working class — it made them want to have sex with me. But that’s not the same as being working class. Because being working class means having a shitty job, having a poor life, having no job, no opportunities, not traveling. It’s not the same as someone wanting to have sex with you. You can’t just…
…separate sex and love from society?
Yeah. A lot of people are having this conversation today about race as well, not only about class. In the gay community, you have people who are more attracted to Black men — and that’s often called fetishization. When some people say it’s colonial, I think that’s unfair. Because colonialism is not about having sex with someone — consensual sex. Colonialism was about burning villages, raping women, killing people, killing men, imposing another language. So we cannot apply those categories so caricaturally or naively — even if, of course, we can and should ask questions again and again.
There are many ways of talking about reality. In a way — on the complete other extreme — when Proust writes about the aristocracy, he’s also writing about the working class, because it makes you measure the distance. It makes you measure the gap, the inequality, the violence. So there are many ways of writing about one question, one problem, one issue.
When Marguerite Duras wrote The Lover, she spoke so much — indirectly — about the violence of the colonial world. It’s always there, in the background. But in a strange way, you feel it even more — because she’s having sex with this Chinese man within that colonial context.
And you can write about the end of the world by writing the story of a passion. When Marguerite Duras wrote The Lover, she spoke so much — indirectly — about the violence of the colonial world. It’s always there, in the background. But in a strange way, you feel it even more — because she’s having sex with this Chinese man within that colonial context. You feel it even more than if she were writing a historical study. So there is, as you say, an ethical way of writing — one that makes it possible to talk about the things you don’t talk about.
You know, it’s a little bit like when I was writing the first book about my mother. I was so ashamed, because I was writing a happy story — a story where my mother escapes and everything. And I felt so ashamed. I was thinking, my God, there are so many problems and violences and issues — and I’m going to write a beautiful story about someone’s escape. And I know that in our world, people love beautiful endings.
They will always applaud you because it reassures them.
Yes. So I felt very guilty and ashamed. But then, while writing the book, I thought — maybe I can find a way, a tone, a style, a structure… I don’t really know — but something in the craft itself, in the writing, so that when people read the story of my mother, they can also feel all the stories of women who never escaped.
That’s why the title is A Woman’s Battles and Transformation, not My Mother’s Battles and Transformation.
Exactly. And in fact, it’s really related to what we’re talking about now. One of the questions was: how can I create a kind of sadness, or anger, out of beauty? Because the story of my mother is beautiful. When I traveled and talked about the book, most of the people who came to the readings told me, “Oh, you know, my mother had the same story, but she couldn’t escape.” Or, “My grandmother had the same story, but she couldn’t escape.” And so writing about my mother’s escape made visible the fact that some women don’t escape.
I always carry with me, in my wallet, a picture of a woman from Pakistan — someone gave it to me after a reading. She told me her grandmother had lived her whole life in Pakistan and couldn’t escape. She said, “She was like your mother, but she couldn’t escape.” And I keep that picture with me. It’s here, in my room. I have it in my wallet.
How beautiful. Literature does its job in unexpected ways.
Yeah, yeah. And… also, one of the most moving things someone ever told me was when I was in Brazil. They said, “Your books are a better description of the favelas than the books written by people who actually write about the favelas in Brazil.” As a reader, I’ve sometimes had that feeling too — that I see more of my own experience in books about Black Americans…
It was the same for me. I grew up reading a lot of Toni Morrison — and speeches by Martin Luther King, his biography, and so on.
This question of identification is extremely complicated. That’s why we’re talking about how some people make political conversations too simple — and too naive — just like with desire. I think it’s the same with identification. Some people say, “As a gay person, I didn’t have enough representation in my childhood,” which is, once again, a very important and true thing. And I will always fight for people to have more representation. But we shouldn’t forget that it’s also much more complex.
For example, as a child — as a gay person — women gave me a sense of representation, sometimes even more than gay men. When I saw pop singers like Britney Spears as a child, I saw how they were over-shining and over-performing this kind of joy. For me, that was a key against the shame of my sexuality — it was a kind of counter-attack. And sometimes that gave me more of a sense of representation than what I saw later in Brokeback Mountain.
Like I said the other night — in a patriarchal society gay men are the ones who actually love women.
When you’re gay, you love women — you admire them. I know that those women in pop music — like Lady Gaga or Britney Spears — were, for many women around me, sometimes very oppressive figures, because they projected an idea of what it means to be feminine, what it means to be a woman. They wear so much makeup, they’re slim, they’re blonde, they dye their hair, they’re glamorous. And for some women around me, growing up with those figures was very heavy.
But for me, as a gay person, it was liberating — the possibility of being hyper-feminine, which was exactly what society wanted to kill me for. To have someone who pushed femininity so far was, you know, like a possibility — a model of a body. So something that can be conservative or oppressive for one person can be liberating for someone else. It’s very, very difficult, very complicated.
I remember recently talking with James Ivory — he’s almost a hundred years old — the filmmaker of Maurice, one of the very first openly gay films. He told me he grew up in the 1920s and 30s, a hundred years ago. And he said: “During my childhood, when the Marilyn Monroe movies were coming out, I would be in my bedroom imitating her. And it was so liberating.” And for Marilyn Monroe, it killed her — that pressure of being the feminine ideal destroyed her. But for James, it was liberating.
You mentioned Didier Eribon a couple of times. Can you imagine an alternative scenario of your life where you don’t meet him?
If I hadn’t met Didier, my life would be so different, I think. When I was writing Change, I thought about it a lot — what it meant to meet Didier, a writer who was older than me and became such a big inspiration, and what my life would have been if I hadn’t met him. One of the things I wanted to do in Change was to demystify the myth of the writer. There are so many writers who tell the story: “I wanted to become a writer because I was so moved by words, by sentences, by style, by metaphors in my early childhood. And then I pursued this very noble goal of creating beauty.”
For you, it was meeting Didier. In Change, you write that you could just as well have met someone else — an actor, a director — and your path of escape would have looked different.
If I had met a ballet dancer, maybe I would have become a ballet dancer.
That would have been harder, though — you have to go to the classes.
Yes, you have to start very early. So maybe let’s say a contemporary dancer — it’s a bit more democratic. But to say that I wrote because I wanted to escape, and not because I loved metaphors or style, was for me also a way of inscribing more life into literature — and, in a way, paying a more, I hope, beautiful tribute to it. To talk about literature as something that can really help, as a kind of medicine — not just about a child who loves metaphors.
You can also read: Didier Eribon: “We must rebuild the welfare state, restore the idea of equality”
I was reading this biography of Balzac by Stefan Zweig when I was writing Change. It’s a very beautiful biography. And Stefan Zweig says that Balzac wanted to become Napoleon — that it was his dream to become Napoleon. But he tried so many things, and he was bad at them all. And then he turned to writing — but he didn’t do it for the sake of beauty or style. He did it because he wanted to be noticed, to be important, to exist in history. And I remember, when I was reading this biography by Zweig, how subversive it is to tell the story of becoming a writer in such a different way — in a more human way. Someone who simply wanted to exist in the eyes of others. He was afraid of being forgotten.
Did you read Orwell’s Why I Write? It’s a short essay. He compares writers, politicians, and some other people who feel the need to be in the public sphere. He says they’re very vain and egotistical — but they have this need, and the talent, to make it. So in a way, they’re similar — in their need to be seen. Some people are born with this urge, this necessity…
It’s what many gay kids did. I said in Who Killed My Father that during my whole childhood, I was putting on shows for my family. I would put on dance shows — I’d walk into the living room and say to everyone, “Stop, stop, stop! I have a new show!” I was performing. I wanted people to see me. And maybe writing is a continuation of that. But it can change. Now I sometimes feel more and more the urge to be less seen. I want it less and less, in a way. We’ll see where it goes.
I wanted people to see me. And maybe writing is a continuation of that. But it can change. Now I sometimes feel more and more the urge to be less seen.
Yeah, like you said about Foucault the other night at the Academy — when he said, “Why do I have to write another book? Again and again.”
I mean, I think I have to write books — because I think life is too long and too boring without writing. Sometimes, when I finish a book, I allow myself a few months of just reading and thinking, not writing, in order to reframe my mind. But after some point, I start to think — how do I fill my days without writing? A day is too long. Life is too long. A month is too long. For me, writing is also a kind of necessity — a way to be able to live everyday life. There’s this very beautiful sentence by Imre Kertész, the Hungarian writer, who said: “If I wasn’t writing, I would exist — and if I existed, I don’t know what I would expose myself to, and I prefer not to know.” So writing is also a way of not existing. And maybe this is the anxiety I feel when I don’t write for too long — I suddenly feel there are too many things I’d have to confront, and I’d rather not. I’m sure you know the feeling.
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