Louis’s sympathetic recognition of his mother’s condition as an adult comes with a heavy dose of guilt for his behavior as a child. “She no longer had a story of her own her story could only be, ultimately, story.” “er life was stripped of all interest,” Louis observes. Taking care of five children, managing her health aide work and an embittered, housebound partner who screams hateful epithets at her, Monique resigns herself to a life subordinate to her husband’s. Her husband refuses, and she gives birth to twins.
Knowing that the family cannot afford to take care of more children, she suggests getting an abortion. Then, the coup de grâce: Monique discovers that she is pregnant again, despite taking the precautions of an IUD. Things go from bad to worse when a debilitating accident at the factory renders her husband incapable of working, drastically reducing their income to the meager allowance of state benefits and compelling her to take a job as a home health aide. Louis is born while Monique’s relationship with his father deteriorates into a familiar pattern of alcoholism and rage. “He smelled so nice.”Īs any reader familiar with The End of Eddy and Who Killed My Father will know, the honeymoon doesn’t last. “e was different,” she tells Louis, adding that he took her on beach trips, took her shopping, and wore cologne. A few years later, Monique gathers the courage to leave her first husband, soon marrying Louis’s father in the hope of a better life. She left the program soon after discovering that she was pregnant with her first child, and married the child’s abusive, philandering, alcoholic father. At 16, Monique enrolls in a hospitality program with dreams of becoming a chef, a choice that is traditional (“women had always done the cooking and served others”) but which also promises a more self-determined life (a career distinctly her own). The portrait we get of Monique’s life is constructed out of vignettes gleaned from scrapbooks and interviews, rendered in the signature collage style that Louis deftly uses to connect his mother’s experience to a broader narrative of working-class struggle.
Louis, now a successful writer whose life has taken him far beyond the small-town torments of The End of Eddy, finds a photo of his mother at age 20 that evokes a sense of freedom and possibility ahead that is at once arresting and touching, in large part because it anticipates a life that departs so starkly from the one Louis knows lay ahead of her. The image suggests the possibility of a quite different life for a woman whose existence he claims had been “deformed and almost destroyed by misery and masculine violence.” It also forces Louis to confront the ways in which he has been, along with his father and other men, “one of the agents of destruction.” To understand and reconcile with the woman who was his mother and the woman who she could have been, Louis excavates her story as a means not only to “explain and understand her life” but also to reveal the “external forces - society, masculinity, my father” - that shaped the narrow confines of her asphyxiating existence. However, as the title suggests, this one has a victim-to-victor arc after many miserable years, she finally breaks free.Ī Woman’s Battles opens on a note of apology. In A Woman’s Battles (translated into English by Tash Aw), the author’s now thrice-told tale zeroes in on his mother’s experience, with an even sharper attention to the ways in which the braided system of class and gender norms imprisons his mother.
That story was told again in Who Killed My Father (2018), in which Louis broke another of those literary rules he’d been given - “never resemble a political manifesto” - by writing a manifesto-cum-memoir that cast Nicolas Sarkozy and the neoliberal bent of the French political system as the villains who produced the poor health, alcoholism, and debilitating social roles that Louis argues broke his father.
He has been here before, first with his autobiographical novel The End of Eddy (2014), the wildly popular story of his childhood as a closeted gay kid whose alcoholic father and abuse by local bullies drive him from the small industrial town of Hallencourt in northern France to the bright lights of Paris, where he will forge a life as a successful gay writer toasted the world over. The author’s long essay returns, once again, to the scene of small-town struggle that saturates Louis’s childhood memories. In his latest book, A Woman’s Battles and Transformations, Louis defies these edicts and repeats himself. ÉDOUARD LOUIS HAS BEEN “told that literature should never attempt to explain, only to capture reality.” He has been told that literature should never have to repeat itself.
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