‘Literature is about digging, not putting on a show’: author Édouard Louis on writing as an act of working-class defiance

Édouard Louis has spent the last 13 years defying literary and political expectations by writing what he describes as a “family saga” – a series of autofictional novels about members of his family, with the explicit aim of illustrating how the lower-working-class milieu of French society in which he was raised inflicts violence on its subjects in constant but idiosyncratic ways. 

“Classism gives this illusion of uniformity for people on the outside looking in,” says Louis. “This idea that all working-class people are the same, experience oppression in the same way.

“I wanted to write against that idea.”

Louis grew up amid poverty and violence in a working-class town in northern France, struggling with bullying and family dysfunction as a young gay boy in what he describes as an overwhelmingly homophobic community. He escaped what some might call – including Louis himself in this interview  – “class determinism”, or destiny. He managed to get out of his hometown and went to school in Amiens, a much bigger city where he felt his life expanding. 

Not long after his escape, he became the first person in his family to go to university. He moved to Paris and became fast friends with university professor Didier Eribon, who introduced him to the world of the Parisian left and solidified the politics that so clearly define and motivate him.

Along with his continued friendship with Eribon, Louis surrounds himself with other prominent thinkers and writers – French philosopher Geoffroy de Lagasnerie, British-Malaysian novelist Tash Aw, renowned American photographer Nan Goldin and the memorist and writer Yiyun Li.

Louis’s family saga began in 2014, when he published the first in the series, The End Of Eddy. Édouard himself – Eddy – is the subject of the novel, which depicts the experience of a young queer kid growing up in poverty in northern France.

The following year, he wrote a moving – and prescient – political manifesto about how the left’s failure to properly understand the working class could pave the way for the rise of the far right. The essay, entitled Manifesto for an Intellectual and Political Counteroffensive, argues that the left must work hard to actively reject rightwing debates around national identity and instead refocus public intellectual discourse on class struggles and related exploitation and violence. 

Unwilling to be pigeonholed as a writer who had moved irretrievably into polemic and philosophical work, Louis then returned to the story of his family. The second novel, also about himself, was called History of Violence and described his rape and attempted murder – again while placing the reader in the context of the true consequences of class oppression. 

His next intervention was Who Killed My Father, another autobiographical novel about how his father’s life in manual labour resulted in the illness, disability and alcoholism that ultimately killed him. A Woman's Battles and Transformations, which detailed his mother’s life and oppression by patriarchal and class structures, came out in 2021. This was followed by another novel about his mother, Monique Escapes (2024).

Unsurprisingly, Louis has been reflecting on the alarming rise in rightwing politics and the slouch towards fascism we are currently witnessing. He lives in Paris but is on a world tour to mark the publication of Collapse, a novel which sets out to understand the life of his brother, who suffered an alcohol-related death aged just 38. Last week he was in London, where he sat down to answer the Nerve Q&A. 

In a way, it came from the fact that after I started to write these books, some people expected me to move on to other stories, to other kinds of stories, easier stories. And I wanted to defeat the expectation and to not do what some part of the literary world was prescribing to me. They wanted me to stop confronting these uncomfortable truths and realities of hyper-poverty intertwined with hyper-racism, homophobia, violence against women. People really wanted me to move on to easier realities. And that made me want to write more about those things. I love to do the opposite of what people prescribe to me.

Exactly, because literature is about digging. It's not about putting on a show. It's not about giving them the next entertainment or the next surprise.

I have the impression that nowadays, more and more writers desperately want to be loved. And it's hard to resist this temptation, of course, because we all want to be loved. But at some point in history, there were many writers who were proud of not being loved. If you were Samuel Beckett or Jean Genet or Pasolini, they didn't want the mainstream newspapers to adore them. They were glad to be hated. In the literary world, at some point we shifted from a pride of not being loved to a pride of being loved. My question is, how much does this affect literary creation?

In a way, this kind of active will to defeat and disappoint became a tool for my freedom and my autonomy in the writing process. And it's in a way very conscious, very political. In my opinion, every experience or every fact or every body deserves its own literary form. You cannot apply the same literary structure to different experiences that you are trying to capture.

The book started with a mistake. I thought that the death of my brother from alcohol at 38 was the perfect realisation of social determinism. But at some point, I realised that I was wrong. 

In my childhood, one of the forms that social violence was taking was the way it was framing people's dreams. Our dreams were framed by social determinism. Our dreams were to get a big TV, to get a big fridge or a big car, or to go to Disneyland once a year. But my brother had big dreams. My brother was dreaming of becoming the biggest butcher in the world. And, you know, superstars like Kate Winslet or Cate Blanchett would come to his butcher shop, and paparazzi would take pictures because it would be the hot place where everyone wants to be. My brother's dreams were too big for his mind. 

So I realised the book was not about social determinism, but, in a certain way, a failure of social determinism to frame my brother. And that's what created this life.

It’s strange, because when I was writing Collapse, some friends in Paris told me: “Aren't you afraid that it would repeat the book about your father: isn’t it the same story?” 

And I told them: “But my brother died at 38. And my father is still alive”. Some of my friends who were born in the bourgeoisie say “yeah, but in the end, it's the same”. How could they say that?

So I think it's very interesting, the ways that, you know, classism gives this illusion of uniformity for people who are outside looking in. This idea that all working-class people are the same, experience oppression in the same way. I wanted to write against that idea. 

Yes, and I think that it's extremely important to give new representations of the working class within the left, because most people in the working class feel that they are not being recognised by the institutional left, or not being talked about by the left. 

And then they move more and more to the far right, because of the impression that they are the only ones representing them. Either because some part of the left became rightwing – like the Labour party in England, or the Socialist party in France, or the SPD in Germany, because it's really a worldwide shift. Or because sometimes other parts of the left talk about the working class, but they talk about it in such an old-fashioned way that it's a way of not talking about them at all any more.

When these politicians talk about the working class, they are still attached to this idea of factory work and the big industrial working class. And this doesn’t apply neatly to the working class any more, not really – even if many of them work in factories. So maybe also that's why literature is important: to do this job that the politicians are not doing. And to hope that at some point it will inspire them to give new visions.

For example, a lot of people on the left in France say: “The factories have been closed, we have to reopen the factories.” And when I talk with my little brothers and sisters, they don't want to go to the factory. Lots of them want to work for Uber, Deliveroo, because they don't want to have a boss, they don't want to receive orders, they don't want to have a schedule. And the problem is that, because the left is not thinking about those things, the right sees it and transforms it into a way to make the working class even more precarious.

But what if, on the left, we listen to the young generation of the working class and we say: “Right, they don't want to have a boss any more. That’s fantastic news for us. Let's use it against bosses, against hierarchy, instead of letting the right benefit from it”? We have to create leftwing answers to the problems of today. 

So the thing is not to obey what the right says about “flexibility” – all those ugly words – but it's about seizing the anarchist mood in society. 

I mean, it's very difficult to answer because I'm not a monotheist. Hmm. OK. Jamaica Kincaid.

I would say to dig deeper in the ugliness, because the more you are aware of it and the more you confront it, the more you can change it.

I have never been so optimistic as when I am confronted with a representation of the violence of this world. It’s a very strange paradox. “Hopeful” stories don't make me hopeful, but sad stories make me hopeful, because I think: “Oh, I see what needs to be fixed. Let’s get to work.”

Collapse by Édouard Louis (translated by Tash Aw) is published by Vintage, £18.99