The Potentials of Liberation
We are re-publishing the essay that accompanied the Slovenian edition of Édouard Louis’s A Woman’s Battles and Transformations, published by Založba /cf. in 2023. Since then, Louis has also written another book about his mother, published in English as Monique Escapes. Most recently, he has also written the novel about his brother — mentioned in the essay — who died at 38 from alcoholism, called Collapse, thereby completing his “family saga.” After the publication of the last book, he wrote on social media that he would never use the word “family” again.
First of all: a dilemma. It is difficult for me to pen anything about Édouard Louis that you don’t already know. You’ve likely read him, watched a documentary about his life or a play or performance based on his works in which he described and explained his life more succinctly than anyone else could, making everything possible to say about him a mere reduction and simplification. And if not that, you are more or less familiar with his life, the motives central to his writing, and the fact that he is one of the biggest literary stars of the 21st century, and again I would just be wasting your time.
Unlike Cankar or Handke, Louis is keenly aware that the patriarchy already sees to punishment and that nobody escapes its fines.
The only appeal I can make is that it never hurts to hear a refresher. I think about the unreliability of my own memory, as it steadily clears its cache of things read and contemplated more than two years ago, and I convince myself: indeed, there is no harm in repeating the facts.
Édouard Louis’s bio- and bibliography go something like this: a young, gay man (born 1992) breaks out from a poor industrial village in the north of France, making his way from the lower working class to the height of the intellectual elite. He studied at the École normale supérieure, rubbing elbows with renowned members of the French literati, some of whom had a profound effect on him, for instance the philosophers Didier Eribon and Geoffroy de Lagasnerie. He became an author – now translated into over 25 languages – early on, setting the sights of his literary interests and efforts on the effects systemic violence wreaks upon the individual, upon our bodies, and upon the possibilities life offers us. Until now, only his debut work, The End of Eddy, has been available to us in Slovenian — a novel in which Louis recounts his rural childhood, where most people could barely scrape together the bare essentials, and where nothing was in abundance except chauvinism, xenophobia, and homophobia. Now his debut novel has been joined by three more translations. His third publication is the political manifesto Who Killed My Father, in which he calls out political actors by name (Nicolas Sarkozy, François Hollande, Jacques Chirac, and Emmanuel Macron) for instating a law that forced his father to return to his job despite suffering a work-related injury, ultimately rendering him handicapped. Now we also have A Woman’s Battles and Transformations and his novel Change, in which he gave the blueprint for his escape from his place of birth and described how “seeking revenge on life through literature” is one of his motivations for writing. With the exception of his second novel A History of Violence (2016), in which he describes and processes in a literary manner an incidence of sexual assault and robbery that he suffered, we therefore nearly have the young author’s entire opus.
The manifestation of class shame
Monique Bellegueule, Édouard Louis’s mother. As well as Neža Cankar, Ivan Cankar’s mother:
Another day, she came by the schoolyard where I was playing with Cindy, a girl from the village. Cindy asked, Is that your mother? No, I replied, I don’t know who that woman is. I didn’t want the others to see her, and to see through her another person in me – my past, the poverty. I didn’t want the others to know that my mother didn’t look like theirs, that my mother hadn’t had an education, had never traveled, didn’t have clothes as fine as theirs, that she wasn’t cheerful and sleek like their mothers.
Did Louis write this, or did someone perhaps transplant Cankar into the present day? Or, conversely, did someone translate Louis into the Slovenian of the early 20th century:
And Joseph came by surrounded by a group of jolly comrades. He spied his mother, dressed in a green farm dress with a floral pattern, high boots spattered with mud, a red shawl, a colored headscarf, a large bindle, and a clumsy parasol. “Isn’t that your mother,” one of his mates inquired. “That’s not my mother!” bristled Joseph.
This scene of seeing their mothers again is identical in the works of authors separated by more than a century, as it is built on the same trope: whenever someone crosses a social class diagonally — in both cases at hand, the son — moving from a rural or working-class background toward the urban educated elite, whenever they begin distancing themselves from their mothers experientially and culturally, that mother becomes a dangerous element in that she can publicly reveal the truth about the son’s provenance. Encountering such a mother in public leads to feelings of class shame. To Louis’s and Cankar’s accounts, we could add a third work, namely Peter Handke’s A Sorrow Beyond Dreams (1972), in which the following scene plays out:
We went with a group of people into the mountains, and she wanted to veer off the path a bit to relieve herself. I was embarrassed and I cried so much that she ended up holding it in.
All three authors, each in their own time and environment, and each grappling with their own class shame, also give voice to intellectual (or class-based) violence against their mothers. In his A Cup of Coffee, Cankar roughly rebuffs his mother, who represents every ill from which he seeks to escape:
I turned and said in a spiteful voice: “Leave me alone! … I don’t want it now!”
Similarly in Foreign Knowledge:
She closed the book slowly, laying it down with the others, then she came to me. “What’s in those books?” she asked. “Foreign knowledge!” was my reply. It was just my tongue that thus responded, but in my heart was ample sadness.
And similarly in Louis:
When I came back to the village those first times, I wanted to show you my new membership – that is to say, the growing divide between my life and yours. It was above all through language that I made this distinction. I was learning different words in high school, and these words became the symbols of my new life – unimportant words like bucolic, fastidious, laborious, underlying. They were words I’d never heard before. I used them with you, and you got annoyed: Enough of your minister’s vocabulary! You’d say, That guy – ever since he went to high school he thinks he’s better than us.
These scenes are always followed by an episode of regret for the violence wrought. Cankar punishes himself for treating his mother harshly like a self-flagellating Christian penitent, Handke, who maintained contact with his mother through regular correspondence, takes a more distanced stance, more describing than regretting his actions, while Louis, with his modern sociopolitical understanding of how societal power works, dedicates an entire page of his novel Change to three simple words:
I am sorry.
He also apologizes in the present book: “And you were right. I said those words because I did think I was better than you. I’m sorry.” But without any pious Christian or other self-punishment to follow. Louis is keenly aware that the patriarchy already sees to punishment and that nobody escapes its fines.
The politics of the genre
What is Louis’s The Woman’s Battles and Transformations in terms of genre and thus political intention? Is it a short novel or something else? Is it an autobiography, or yet some third thing?
For every bit of writing that finds its élan within the real and emerges from the real, writing that is therefore not a literary construct separate from the world per se, whose purpose is not to meet its readers’ expectations to find within it confirmation of what they already know and already find familiar, we can discern certain factors regarding its origin and its creation: its author (their gender, sexual orientation, nationality, skin color, etc.), the author’s background, at what thresholds (social class) the author is currently poised, and the temporal milieu (the social function of literature at a given historical moment), and that’s just a rough list of qualifiers.
“The books I have written in the past were books that I decided to write suddenly while I was writing something else and suddenly I felt hit by something around me that made me think I have to write about that and I cannot write about anything else,” Louis said in a public discussion with Tash Aw in London.
Let’s take this statement and push it ad absurdum. We can imagine Édouard Louis sitting in his air-conditioned Parisian apartment – which, we learned in his latest book Change, he bought with the successful profits from his first book – and planning, for instance, an epic family saga, perhaps replete with the literary techniques and methods used across the pond by Philip Roth, the American “novelist of the 21st century” and “author of the great American novel,” in which he used 400 or 500 pages to document the fates of several families and thus the history of the United States itself. Who knows, maybe there is a part of Louis that might want to try its hand at penning such a monumental novel, but at the same time, I’m speculating, his experiences (poverty, homophobia, etc.) are preventing him from doing so. Maybe he wants, as he stares off into the distance, to write about the eternal and the immutable, to write, let’s call it, the petty-bourgeois novel, but is then completely thrown off track and enraged by society, by its violence, which takes him further and further from contemplating the eternal. At the same time, it’s worth mentioning that especially well-positioned heterosexual men have all the time in the world for describing family sagas, all the space in the world to serve us family stories on 300, 400, even 600 pages of a novel, accustomed as they are to staking out their claim on space, as the public has been their god-given domain forever. More than anything else, they have time. And here they fancy to reckon, as entitled people are so wont, based on themselves, that they have the same 24 hours a day that everyone else has.
The novel of the 21st century, at least any novel worth its salt, has become, more expressly than ever before, a vessel for ideas.
The novel, as we understand it today, has its roots in the 19th and 20th centuries, when its role in society was primarily to present new places, customs, and people, along with their psychological states and interpersonal relations, from platonic and familial to romantic. Since it was written by the higher classes, it conveyed their culture, their aesthetics, and their methods of expressing emotions. Now that traveling has become an option for nearly everyone, now that the internet has connected us, and now that we have all used Google Earth to marvel at the whole world, there is less need for describing the world. With the countless societal and natural disasters that we are informed of on a daily basis and about which we thus have knowledge, we no longer enjoy the privilege of turning to so-called pure literature, to literature that arises separately from actual reality. Or to a novel set outside of society, with no discernible geographical or social background. The novel of the 21st century, at least any novel worth its salt, has become, more expressly than ever before, a vessel for ideas. The petty-bourgeois novel, insofar as one can still be written without being delusional about reality, has today taken on the function of consolidating what is already known, of turning our glance away from catastrophes and inequality. This presumption makes it possible to explain the significant growth of new forms of genre literature, whose value is still primarily found in its entertainment, in its ability to distract us from societal realities. The detective novel, for example, which has been so well accepted among the urban urbane, has, despite a range of interesting superficial metamorphoses, retained its initial function of providing respite or even refuge. In a world that is increasingly hard to understand as a whole and at a time when the middle class is disintegrating, it offers a story that, at the end, proves to be well-composed but does naught to change the social order.
In one of his essays, Aleksandar Hemon remarked that the function of such literature is to demonstrate the “invariability of the identical.” Everything will stay as it is simply because it’s always been that way. Such a novel “make[s] a case for this life as endless and universal, as making perfect, if pleasingly complicated, sense, as containing all that is required for the ever comforting processes of our understanding ourselves. Literature becomes ontological propaganda, a machinery for making reality appear unalterable.”
Perhaps the working class (within the time that it dedicates to mere survival) tends not to read because it instinctively knows that the literature of the middle class ignores it, fails to represent it, and perhaps indeed even works against its best interests.
The function of the petty-bourgeois novel is to preserve the status quo and thus the privileges of this class, which finds its place on the social scale between the capitalist, whose values it is eager to imitate, and the working class, which it is eager to ridicule – in an intermediate no man’s land, as a buffer mitigating the pressures of the two classes surrounding it. The reason the working class tends not to enjoy reading literature has little to do with its lack of knowledge or proper values, as the middle class likes to assert so as to make a clear distinction between them. Perhaps the working class (within the time that it dedicates to mere survival) tends not to read because it instinctively knows that the literature of the middle class ignores it, fails to represent it, and perhaps indeed even works against its best interests.
Writers who inhabit stable gender categories, stable social stations, mostly write within stable literary genres, genres whose conventions are not interrogated by the stories themselves. Such authors do not push the novel to its limits, for instance towards political writing, essayism, or theory, but they often resort to an omniscient narrator who is unreliable in their method of engaging in mental gymnastics, intellectual self-referentiality, metafiction, if you will, or play, where play, too, is considered a matter of privilege. Play is not the domain of those for whom survival is primary. Let’s take an extreme example: in Cankar’s writing, the children are already old.
But the author whose origins are not in stability, not in a clearly cemented social class, the author who is currently transcending social class while failing to meet the criteria of heteronormativity, will inevitably demonstrate their circumstances in their writing. If you haven’t come from anything stable, you won’t be stable in your writing, either. Such writing will as a consequence resist strict classification and might take on shorter forms, as someone who has not been delegated any space by society will intuitively refrain from taking up all the space in the world to pour out their thoughts.
The novel is the most elite literary genre, a world that operates according to rules set largely by the privileged, and so writing about the underprivileged within the context of a novel necessarily amounts to writing against the novel.
The novel is the most elite literary genre, a world that operates according to rules set largely by the privileged, and so writing about the underprivileged within the context of a novel necessarily amounts to writing against the novel, or in contravention of literature itself. Or as Louis himself writes in the present work:
Because I know now that what is called literature has been constructed against lives and bodies like my mother’s. Because I know, from here on, that to write about her, and to write about her life, is to write against literature.
In contrast to the authors of petty-bourgeois novels, Louis attempts in his writing to realize the interests of the suppressed – to represent the bodies of those bludgeoned by systemic violence, to chip away at the hierarchy of stably allocated social levers of power. His effort cannot be realized within the scope of the petty-bourgeois novel, often presented as a “great novel.” What Louis does write, what he is capable of writing based on his experience of social violence, are excerpts from his own life, individual family portraits that escape strict classification: in his first book, the portrait of Eddy, whom the author strove to forget, to destroy, a feat in which he saw symbolic success by changing his name, then a “great breakthrough” in his second book with a portrait of his father, a depiction of his psychophysical decline, in the third the story of his mother’s liberation, as she, like her son, changed her name: “She no longer wanted to be called Bellegueule, the name I inherited when I was born, and had shared with her, a heavy, lower-class name.” Louis is not writing some “grand family saga” but painting a fresco, as it has been termed by a reviewer of his work, and that fresco is composed of individual portraits. It would not be amiss to think, then, that he would devote the next book to his brother, a question asked in the aforementioned discussion by Tash Aw. “My brother just died two months ago,” Louis explained. “He was not sick … he just died because in this milieu many people die in their thirties because they drink alcohol.”
The Problem with the Crime Blotter
Cankar, Handke, Louis – all three have erected written monuments to women to whom nobody else was erecting monuments. To women who themselves, with their low level of education and the lack of time in which to do so, had no opportunity to take a quill to their own experience. Just as in Cankar’s time, so too today: when we read about the lives of uneducated rural women, about domestic violence, femicide, about several hundred seamstresses who suddenly lost their jobs, it is usually in the crime section or some dry statistics, not literature. The effect of statistics is that, even if guided by a noble aim striving for the opposite, they don’t hurt: statistics present tragedies to us impersonally, dryly, from a distance, simultaneously separating us from a sense of urgency, sympathetic pain, perhaps even responsibility. We only recognize as tragic that which strikes near to us. Accordingly, to approach the tragic we must convert statistics into an individual experience, which must be then illustrated at the level of the social: the current work is not titled My Mother’s Battles and Transformations but A Woman’s, with which Louis clearly implies that there are countless stories like his mother’s.
Let me return to class shame, to the observation that all three authors, Cankar, Handke, and Louis, feel the same discomfort whenever they are both in the presence of their mothers and in the public eye. If the feeling of shame has remained the same through the decades, does that not imply that the station reserved for mothers and women of the lower classes within our patriarchal society has similarly remained the same from Cankar to the present day? In terms of chronology, the mentioned works occur as follows: Cankar penned My Life in 1920, Handke A Sorrow Beyond Dreams in 1971, and Louis the present work in 2021.
Cankar’s mother had no opportunity to be anything other than what she was and had no ambitions beyond that – it is impossible to yearn for that which you do not know exists. In Cankar’s work Lenart the Sinner, the mother tells her son that she feels wrung out, as if she had no bones, and that she was like to die of old age. Her son responds: “It’s not old age, mother! It’s exhaustion, inhuman, unnatural! At your age, other women are young, I’ve seen plenty of them; their eyes are gay, their lips red, hands smooth. They ride around in respectable carriages, drawn by two strong, handsome horses. You drew your own wagon, through the mud and up the hills.” As Marcel Štefančič Jr. noted in his monumental work Ivan Cankar, Cankar’s and many other farming or working-class mothers craved what they did not have: “She is tired of capitalism, of the zero-sum game. She is dead, though she still lives.” Neža Cankar could not save herself, transform herself, because at the time such a thing didn’t exist even as a wild dream, let alone opportunity. In Cankar’s day, the lives of women, especially uneducated rural ones, were reduced to constant self-sacrifice for others, to a battle for survival, which consequently greyed their heads and pushed them into early graves.
Handke’s mother eventually took her own life – precisely because she had once dared to hope. Precisely because she knew another life was possible, yet could not reach it.
Handke’s mother, as described in Sorrow Beyond Dreams, dreamed, in the 1950s, of a different life. Unlike Cankar’s mother, she wanted to live in the city, to work, to be independent. But since those things were out of reach, she gradually began to disappear. Divorce was legal at the time, yet still considered morally unacceptable, especially in the conservative Christian environment in which she lived.
She could not find a moment for herself, because “living spontaneously – going for a walk in the middle of the workday, falling in love again, or, as a woman, having a drink alone in a bar – all this meant doing something forbidden; only spontaneously would people break into song or ask someone to dance.”
And so she gradually withdrew into herself. “Of course she read books only as stories from the past, never as dreams of the future; in them she found everything she had missed and everything she would never be able to make up for. She had long since abandoned the idea of any future for herself,” Handke writes.
His mother eventually took her own life – precisely because she had once dared to hope. Precisely because she knew another life was possible, yet could not reach it.
“Only optimists commit suicide, optimists who no longer succeed at being optimists,” wrote the Romanian philosopher Emil Cioran. “The others, having no reason to live, why would they have any to die?”
Perhaps I shouldn’t have written that Handke’s mother was unable to save herself. She chose the only exit available to her. The tragedy lies elsewhere: in the fact that there was only one exit.
And so the haunting question, one that already contains its own answer: in her time and in her Christian surroundings, was suicide considered the lesser sin than divorce?
Handke himself seems to support the idea that his mother saved herself. When he learned of her death, he wrote:
“THAT’S IT. THAT’S IT. VERY GOOD. VERY GOOD. The whole flight, I was overcome with pride that she had actually committed suicide.”
Louis’s mother saved herself in the 21st century with a new life. A year after nearly killing her son out of neglect, she left her husband:
One night, the year after my near-death, another call. Her voice rang out in the darkness around me: “At last. I’ve done it.” […] I understood immediately what she was talking about, and I replied with the same excitement: “Tell me everything! How did it happen?”
Louis’s mother was already able to realize her dreams, perhaps even to go beyond them, experiencing something that she couldn’t have even dreamed about. The struggle for emancipation has ensured over the decades that women and minorities enjoy new rights, you will say. Partly, but it’s not just about that.
The role of the gay son
In his public appearances, Édouard Louis, spewing an extraordinarily articulate barrage of words (for which he always also apologizes), likes to stress that he and his mother saved themselves because, in the village, they represented “the other,” because they were oppressed – his mother for being a woman and him for failing to conform to masculine norms. Unlike for his brother and father, whose lives ended tragically, that environment was extremely dangerous for both Louis and his mother. The danger of violence to which the two of them were constantly subjected, however — to paraphrase Hölderlin — increased their chances of salvation. Unlike mother and son, who knew they were being subjected to injustice, Louis’s father explained his suffering as that of his own choosing: he didn’t attend school because he was a real man, he worked a backbreaking job because he was a real man. He drank a lot because he was a real man. Édouard and his mother were keenly aware that society had shorted them sorely and they needed to reclaim their due:
“You see, I told you I’d do it. I’d already done it once with my first husband, so I could do it a second time. I knew I could do it a second time.”
In the past, divorce didn’t even exist as a possibility, as a man’s wife and children were considered his property. And even when it became possible – in the time of Handke’s mother – it remained in many places quite socially unacceptable. Édouard’s mother didn’t have her own resources, but today at least there exists some set of systemic aid for single, unemployed divorced women, in Slovenia at least in the form of minimal social support and alimony payments. Louis’s mother was thus able, after leaving her second husband, to live with her youngest two children, “she was living with my younger brother and sister in public housing on the edge of the fields, where she had been relocated by social services.”
The danger of violence to which the two of them were constantly subjected, however — to paraphrase Hölderlin — increased their chances of salvation.
In her case, however, the role her son’s influence played in her liberation cannot be ignored. Throughout the book, Louis underlines the circumstances behind her attempts at saving and transforming herself – providing the family with a vacation, the promise of a lottery win, befriending her fellow villager Angélique from the office class – but perhaps the author himself played the biggest role on her path to freedom. When Louis diagonally (then also vertically, materially) transcended social classes, i.e. reaching his place in urban culture, and took note of how the women in the city lived differently, he began encouraging his mother to leave:
“When I saw in the city that no woman was raising five kids and taking care of her husband on a mere 600 euros per month, that the women there were allowed to put on makeup, that in the city there didn’t exist such a life as hers, I began convincing her upon my return to the village: It’s not right. Father cannot be allowed to treat you like that,” he explained in the aforementioned interview.
This type of encouragement, emboldening their mothers to seek liberation, was something that Cankar and Handke were unable to imagine in their time.
Handke tries to free his mother by buying her household appliances, which results in nothing else than her not knowing what to do with her now liberated but idle hands. Cankar and Handke were unable to help their mothers because a solution didn’t exist, but Louis’s mother did not just benefit from being born decades later (she protested about the appliances her husband gave her, saying she was more than just a maid), but also the fact that her son was gay. “As a gay person and my mother as a woman, we were suffering from the same kind of violence, which was masculine violence, which was masculine domination in different ways. We realized that we were going through the same thing and so a discussion started,” said Louis in the interview. Allow me to cite from my own book, specifically a moment of reflection about the help I received during my own liberation, in writing about my class shame, from members of the LGBTIQA+ community. “I had an epiphany recently: Didier Eribon, Édouard Louis, Dino Pešut. Antonela Marušić, too. Hey, wait a second. Why are all the people who have had the guts to write about class shame gay? Did I miss something? Perhaps it’s the fact that they were among the first to find the courage because in their lives they have already experienced what it’s like to be marked with shame and so the path towards writing about other types of shame is clear, with the methodology for overcoming their shame already elaborated.”
The liberation of one person or a community – and here it is hardly required that we share some sense of identity or belonging (contrary to what the petty-bourgeois novel teaches us, only repression is universal) – draws others into liberation in its wake. It shows them the method, the means of liberation. In his book Change, Louis writes:
As time went by I began to sincerely love art and literature, I no longer wrote just to get by but for literature itself, not to save myself but to try to help others, maybe it’s banal to put it like that but it’s true, I wanted to write books that would arm others for their struggles.
What could women possibly still want?
“We live in extremely liberal times. Some people even say that women have achieved everything possible in the battle for emancipation,” a journalist from the political weekly Mladina recently challenged me to a debate. “What else could feminists even want these days?”
Louis’s mother was able to free herself, right? She still feels slighted by the class she has finally ascended to, but does she feel repressed due to her gender?
What else could women possibly want?
“An end to femicide,” I responded to the journalist. “An end to the raping of women in war zones, where their bodies serve as a means to exact revenge upon the enemy. Or, and I don’t know what’s worse, that in fleeing those war zones, when they are impotent and vulnerable, they are convenient targets for rape by those they meet on their path towards a better life. An end to the unjust treatment of abuse victims by the police, courts, and media. An end to the endless battle for the right to decide about our own bodies. An end to the idea that equality means having access to the same positions that men have without ever having been at the table in deciding what kind of society we even want. An end to the dynamic that sociologists call homosociality, where only men approve the thoughts of other men, with the result that they don’t even view us women in the same league. We are, most often again with our bodies, merely an asset of trade meant to grow men’s reputations. An end to denying the fact that, within heteronormative relationships, even so-called progressive ones, we still carry out the lion’s share of housework, constantly micromanaging everything, to the point that men, who are supposedly helping by going to the store by themselves, don’t even know what to buy. (…) How much time do we have?” I asked the journalist after a long monologue, then unabashedly continued to list all the things that modern women want.
I saw you happy
How much time do we have, dear reader? Maybe just enough for me to tell you that I thought about social networks when writing this text – I am, after all, a product of the times I live in – and went to see if I could follow the continued story of mother and son in a non-literary medium. I opened up Instagram and typed in: Édouard Louis. The first post on his profile was of the author adorning the cover of a Dutch newspaper. But fortune would smile upon me already in the next post. From 2 July 2023, a video showing a group of actors and actresses along with Édouard on the stage of the Hamburg Schauspielhaus theater following a production based on Louis’s book A Woman’s Battles and Transformations. I turned the volume up and heard the audience applauding loudly, reaching a fever pitch when one of the actors invited Édouard’s mother to come on stage. When Monique arose from her seat, so did the rest of the audience rise in standing ovation. A woman in her 50s, dressed simply, with a bob cut. As she arrives on stage, she lifts her arms high in the air and bows deeply. Édouard, who is standing in the middle, now a step behind her, is holding his phone in one hand and filming the events: his mother, who turned her back to the audience, is now hugging the cast, as if afraid of the spectators, as if she doesn’t belong on stage. When Monique approaches her son, he immediately puts his phone back in his pocket and points back to the audience and pushes her forward. Monique takes another bow. That’s the end of the video.
He captioned the post as follows:
Yesterday I made a surprise for my mother: I brought her to the theatre in Hamburg, to see the adaption of her life on stage, A Woman’s Battles and Transformations, by Falk Richter (Die Freiheit Einer Frau in German). And at the end of the performance, one of the actors asked her to join for the applause. It was a very special moment. To see her going on stage and receiving a standing ovation from more than 1000 people was quite incredible. For her, who, as a working class woman, spent most of her life suffering from exclusion, and from the feeling of being invisible, yesterday felt like beautiful, sweet revenge. I often quote Pierre Begrounioux when he says that the dominant class live two lives: the life of their body, when they walk, eat, make love or breathe, but also a second life in the discourse, in the media, in the arts, in literature, where they are so often represented. The working class rarely gets access to this second, symbolic life. But yesterday, my mother, thanks to a fantastic group of actors, experienced what it feels like to live two lives. After the show, she smiled and told me, “I did it. I am free now.”
And to return to the book: “How to say this without being naive or sounding as if I’m using a dumb, ready-made expression: it moved me to see you happy.”
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Cover photo: Édouard Louis’s archive.
Translated from Slovenian by Josh Rocchio, updated by Dijana Matković.
