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Qui a tué mon père (Who killed my father)

Édouard Louis’s states of precarity
Schaubühne Berlin and Théâtre de la Ville Paris
by
ABR Arts 12 March 2024

Qui a tué mon père (Who killed my father)

Édouard Louis’s states of precarity
Schaubühne Berlin and Théâtre de la Ville Paris
by
ABR Arts 12 March 2024
Édouard Louis in Qui a tué mon père (photograph by Roy Van Der Vegt)
Édouard Louis in Qui a tué mon père (photograph by Roy Van Der Vegt)

For the past decade, French writer Édouard Louis has been excavating and recuperating a childhood spent in a state of acute precarity in the Hauts-de-France. He has written both critically and empathetically about the lives of his parents and siblings, while also casting a probing eye on himself. His first novel, the autofictional En finir avec Eddy Bellegueule (The End of Eddy, trans. Michael Lucey, 2014), was published when he was only twenty-two and has enjoyed significant success in translation. Each of the subsequent books has offered a further investigation of these lives and experiences, with a pointed focus on the ways that poverty, at least in Louis’s experience, is intertwined with racism, homophobia, misogyny, and domestic violence.