Houman Barekat

All about my mother: Édouard Louis’s latest family saga

Monique Bellegueule endured decades of abuse in Normandy until, following her son’s example, she ran away to Paris to find herself

Édouard Louis. Credit: Alamy
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  • A Woman’s Battles and Transformations

    Édouard Louis, translated by Tash Aw

    Harvill Secker, pp. 128, £12

Shunned by his father and his peers because of his homosexuality, Édouard Louis (born Eddy Bellegueule in 1992) left his village in rural Normandy and moved to Paris, becoming the first member of his family to attend university. By his mid-twenties he had published three well-received autobiographical novels: about working-class machismo (The End of Eddy), his experience of sexual assault (A History of Violence) and the condition of the French welfare state (Who Killed My Father).

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