In the past few months I've been exploring autobiographical fiction, an oxymoron that is a legitimate category of literature. At my library, the Brooklyn Public, there are many titles listed as autofiction and that's how I discovered Change by Édouard Louis. Translated from the French by John Lambert, it was published in the U.S. in 2024. Change is the story of Eddy, a boy who grew up in a working class town in northern France where effeminate behavior invited ridicule not only by school mates but family as well. When he gains admission to an arts-based boarding school in a distant city, he's provided with the means to escape. There, he develops a friendship with a classmate named Elena whose family takes him into their home and shares with him a middle class existence of culture and respect that whets his appetite for leaving the poverty and ignorance of childhood. Eddy's first person voice—truthful, searching, and impeccably honest—is riveting. Under its spell, I was placed in an unusually intimate role as a receiver of confidences. How did that happen and how did it happen so quickly?
The novel is divided into four parts. Each one has a title and subtitle. Part 1, Elena, is subtitled fictional conversations with my father. In it, I meet the rough, angry man who, in assorted ways, made it clear that Eddy was not the son he would have chosen. Eddy's imagined conversations revealed not only the family's dire poverty and his parents' inability to accept his homosexuality, but also how his strong and rebellious spirit was formed by the repressive culture of his birthplace. When he encounters Elena at the boarding school, she introduces him to a different kind of life, initiating his desire to leave the social milieu where his desires diverged so conspicuously from accepted norms:
"As I grew up, I silently longed for the men around me, those I saw sawing wood in their gardens in preparation for winter, their muscles taut as they operated the chain saw or carried logs two by two and stacked them in the shed, the men I went to watch at football matches every Sunday. I'd look at their legs and the outline of their cocks under the fabric of their shorts as they ran around the field and I'd have liked them to press my face against their thighs.
"Can parents imagine images like this populating their children's imaginations? Could you have imagined such turmoil behind my childish mask" (106-7)?
What makes this passage feel so intimate is not only the fantasies he describes, but more critically, the question he asks his father. It puts me into the position of eavesdropper, and because Eddy is speaking to his father in a way he couldn't have in reality, I enter a small, private space where I share with the narrator this singular human curiosity about a child's relationship with a parent.
In Amiens, the city where the lycÉe is located, and the place where he spends a lot of time with Elena's family, he finds a mentor who introduces him to life in Paris and he begins to dream about going to school there.
"I no longer liked Amiens.
"There was Elena, but I was sure she'd come with me to Paris.
"Or rather: I knew she wouldn't come, but I made myself believe she would so I wouldn't have to face what I was doing: preparing to abandon her" (140).
Though this excerpt is from Part II, which is no longer a conversation with his father, the narrative maintains the intimacy that was established in Part I. This is necessary for a narrator who is so acutely focused on his own project of transformation. Because he is monitoring everything he does and says, scouring his speech and gestures for any remaining hints of the lower-class he has moved away from, he must be brutally honest with himself. That too, is the effect of the conversations. The rigor of truth, far easier to uphold in a fictional dialogue, was by now, so habitual it commanded not only what he wanted to tell his father, but Édouard as well, the person under construction. Change let me see the long and difficult gestation when Édouard was birthed from Eddy, and then, secure in his identity at last, his entry into life in the present.
Louis, Édouard. Change. Trans. John Lambert. New York: FSG, 2024.
Filed under: Making use of the direct address form in a novel