#LUMINOUS DENTAL TV#
The theatre and TV are part of his mission to “reinvent autobiography as a genre, to push it even further”. “Being on stage is a very different feeling to writing, sitting alone at your desk every day for several years to produce a book,” Louis says. (A Paris court case concerning the allegation resulted in an acquittal in 2020 and Louis has appealed.) His childhood saga of poverty, violence and homophobia in rural France, The End of Eddy, was the first to be adapted for the stage, and now James Ivory is preparing a major TV and streaming series, combining it with Louis’s father’s story. His autobiographical second book, History of Violence (2016), about his allegations of sexual assault in Paris and the police investigation that followed, was also adapted for stage by Ostermeier. The international solo stage show – about how factory work, street-sweeping and French politics broke his father’s life and body – was adapted with the German theatre-maker Thomas Ostermeier and is part of the global phenomenon that Louis’s life story has become. We speak by video, as Louis is in New York, about to go on stage to perform in the theatre adaptation of his 2018 book, Who Killed My Father. Édouard Louis in the stage production of his 2018īook, Who Killed My Father. It will be published in English this month, in translation by Tash Aw. It has been hailed in France as Louis’s best book yet, a poetic, tender, joyous and melancholy postscript to his earlier stomach-punching account of Picardy village life. The resulting autobiographical novel, A Woman’s Battles and Transformations, is written from Louis’s perspective, growing up with Monique and then witnessing her going from being stuck at home frying food and mopping floors to an improbable moment smoking a cigarette with Catherine Deneuve in Paris. And one day she broke her chains, left and totally reinvented herself, and in her 50s found a beautiful freedom, leaving for the city for the first time in her life.” My dad always told her: you stay home, you do the housework, you raise the kids, you don’t wear makeup – he would mock her if she tried to. The heart of his mother’s story, Louis says, is: “She leaves a man she was a prisoner of for 25 years. “I put all his things in bin bags and threw them out on the pavement.”
He was in a Paris flat reading, when his mum called from the village. By then, Louis had gone from a teenager devastated by poverty and homophobic bullying, whose only prospect of happiness was drinking plastic cups of hard alcohol at the village bus shelter and who hadn’t read a novel until the age of 17, to starting work in his late teens on what would become his massive bestseller and bring global fame. It was about falling into the rhythm of time set by a man.”īut decades later, after Louis had escaped to Paris and was becoming a writer, something surprising happened. Not only did he go out, but we had to wait for him to get home to have our dinner, because he couldn’t eat alone. My dad would have a tantrum if we didn’t wait up for him. “That waiting is so often at the heart of masculine domination. “My mother’s role was to stay at home, take care of the kids, do the housework and wait for my dad when he went to the bar,” Louis says. As she put it: “I’m a slave to this shithole.” She had no driving licence, no qualifications, no money and made no decisions. Hers was a life of cleaning, putting meals on the table and being called a fat cow by her husband in front of everyone at the village fete. Louis’s father didn’t like her smiling because “it didn’t correspond to what he expected of her”, Louis says. Monique ended up in a tumbledown village house, raising five children (her husband refused a termination of her last pregnancy, which turned out to be twins). Enter the aftershave-wearing (“rare in those days”) factory worker with whom she would later have Louis. The only way out was to find another man. At 23, she fled with her two children to her sister’s crowded tower‑block flat in a northern industrial town. Monique, from a poor family in the north, became pregnant at 17, abandoned her training at a hospitality school, married for convenience at 18, and by 20 found herself stuck with a man she hated.
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