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). In his latest book he turns the spotlight on his mother, revisiting ‘the succession of accidents that made up her life’. Monique Bellegueule had ambitions to train as a chef, but was derailed by teenage pregnancies and terrible relationships. Having had two children by the age of 20, she left one abusive partner only to shack up with another, Louis’s father, with whom she stayed for 20 years.
A Woman’s Battles and Transformations revolves around shame: the author’s boorish dad is ashamed of his son’s effeminacy; Louis in turn is ashamed of his parents’ coarse mannerisms. When Monique gets a job bathing elderly people, she’s at pains to stress: ‘I’m not a cleaning lady, mind you, I’m a carer. It’s almost like being a nurse.’ In one of the most poignant passages, she is enthusiastically befriended by a bourgeois woman in the throes of a midlife crisis who discards her as soon as she’s feeling better about herself. When pressed as to why she cut contact, she explains that ‘she could no longer stand our family, our table manners… the constant obsessive presence of the TV’. But it’s not all pathos. Monique eventually leaves her husband and rocks up in Paris, where she reconnects with her son and finally gets to live a little.
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