Eddy is a young gay man from a very poor background in Picardy, a former industrial region plagued by all the evils of society: unemployment and alcoholism. He describes his childhood spent in this difficult and violent social environment, without concession, between shame and trauma, sometimes tenderness. From this obstacle course of an authentic "class defector" (“un transfuge de classe”), Eddy will become Edouard, a promising young student and writer. This moving autobiographical story is a portrait of a France abandoned by the elites and very far from the urban and glamourous France. It is also a sober and precise rewriting of his own life in the light of a sociological vision that allows the narrator to understand –and forgive.

The book En finir avec Eddy Bellegueule, published in 2014, received great critical acclaim and opened up a discussion about the place of those left behind in French society. Edouard Louis (b. 1992) is part of the French tradition of self-writing, between autobiography and autofiction, always with this acute awareness of social determinism and social reproduction of which transfuges de classe are only the exceptions that confirm the rule.

We read this book in the fall of 2019.