> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://thebeemagazine.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # Something That I Try to Understand - URL: https://thebeemagazine.com/something-that-i-try-to-understand/ - Published: 2026-11-12T21:05:27.000Z - Updated: 2026-11-13T01:12:17.000Z - Description: Excerpts of a conversation with Édouard Louis, by Andrew McMillan - Author: Andrew McMillan - Tags: Lead Édouard Louis has become one of the most important working-class voices in 21st\-century literature. When he visited London to promote his latest book, Monique Escapes, his *ami* Andrew McMillan talked to him for The Bee Édouard Louis has become one of the most important working-class voices in 21st\-century literature, not just because he writes about working-class life, but because he has transformed the way it can be written about. Since the publication of his first book, *The End of Eddy,* in 2014, his autofiction has challenged the comforting myths that often surround poverty, class and social mobility. They reject nostalgia and sentimentality, insisting instead on the brutal realities of violence, shame, homophobia and economic inequality, while asking difficult questions about who gets to tell the stories of working-class lives. In 2017 Louis met the British poet Andrew McMillan when McMillan interviewed him at a public event in Manchester. Admiring each other's work, the two became friends and since then have met around every two years. When Louis came to London to talk about his latest book, *Monique Escapes*, the two met, and both kindly allowed The Bee to share their conversation via a written piece by McMillan. Their conversation ranged from politics, class and identity to the overcoming of fear in their writing and to Louis' family – particularly his mother, the person at the heart of several of his books, and the subject of his new work, *Monique Escapes*. Tracking their talk, and adding some of his own reflections later, McMillan's account evokes both a friendship between two important writers, and a shared sense of how private experience is bound up with the structures of class, gender and power that shape it. *On the morning that I’m due to travel down to London to meet with Edouard Louis in the new offices of Penguin Random House, the glass walls flanked on one side by the muscular presence of the American Embassy, I go to one of the shelves in the study of my house in North Manchester and pull my old hardback copy of his debut, The End of Eddy. It’s inscribed from an event at Waterstones in Manchester where I’d hosted Édouard in conversation. In the scrawled list of questions I made in the margins I see one that I was planning to ask him today as well, phrased slightly differently. “Is this verbatim truth or is it ‘true’ to the moment and what happened?” Some things don’t change. Some preoccupations remain.* **Andrew McMillan:** What I really wanted to start talking to you about was bravery. In *Possession* by Annie Ernaux, she talks about writing as if you'd be dead when it's published… and the thing I've most admired about all your work is the bravery to just write without fear. What I wrestle with in my work is – I think there's the thing that I would say if I'd be dead when it's published, and there's a person I am now, and somewhere in the middle is what's possible to publish and live with in the world. But it just seems for you, that there’s this writing just what the narrative needs or just being as truthful as possible. And I just wonder how it's possible to be that brave. Or if it feels like brave for you. **Édouard Louis:** It's strange because it doesn't really feel that way. It's bizarre because it's also full of fear. The process is not fearless. For example, when I was writing *Collapse*about the death of my brother from alcohol at 38 years old, a lot of people in my family were really not happy about me writing this book. And my big sister started to threaten me, saying she would sue me, say she would send people to destroy my face and punch me in Paris. And my father also started to threaten me. We completely broke with my father, now we don't speak together anymore because of that book. And I was really scared. But at the same time, something within me, which is hard to explain, couldn't stop, had to do this book. There was a voice telling me that I had to do this book, that I had to understand, that I had to write about my brother and understand why he died, and why he was this person, and why he was so violent and so complex. This was stronger than anything. This was stronger than the fear. That's more or less what happened with all of the books that I wrote, because all of them circle around this family and this autobiographical kind of saga. And for all of them, I was scared, but the desire for truth was stronger than the fear, probably because something within me deep inside knew that the recovery of this truth would give me a lot. **AM:** Is that the difference between just writing something, and writing something truly great: the ability to face that fear and overcome it? A lot of other writers would face those threats of violence, and think, “I'll do something else”, “I'll put that to one side or I'll change it slightly.” But the facing of it, the overcoming it, that's the worthwhile thing that makes the writing important. **EL:** I completely agree. And whether it's autobiography, nonfiction, or fiction, real writing is about not giving up. For example, the fear of not being loved when you write can be a big fear. To me, the problem is that today in literature, too many writers are obsessed with being loved. They want to be loved, and they write in order to be loved, to get an immediate recognition or to get literary prizes… I feel that historically speaking, in literature, there was a kind of pride not to be loved, you know? If you were Jean Genet or Samuel Beckett, you didn't want Le Figaro to love you, you didn't want the right-wing newspaper, you didn't want The Sun, or I don't know, you didn’t want the Prix Goncourt to love you, you know? Of course, of course we are human, we want to be loved, we want to be applauded, we want to be cheered up. But you have to overcome it and to feel this pride in not being loved and in not searching for it. I think that's why a lot of literature today is so mainstream. *I reflect too, and me and É chatted a little about the deleterious effects of social media on this kind of phenomenon, which I think drives both a desire for instant gratification. A poet posting a photo of a full poem that just had published in a journal, rather than encouraging followers to buy the journal, is often an interesting example of this. I find myself wondering why the poet didn’t save themselves six months of waiting and wondering, and just post a photo of the poem as soon as they felt it was ready. The answer, I suppose, is that they wanted the validation of an external source (a magazine editor), but also the instant validation that one gets from the screen. All writers want to be loved, it is true, and want to be applauded – the trick is not just to become OK with being booed or even ignored instead, but to become stronger in waiting for the applause, which might never come, or come only after one's death.* **AM**: I'm fascinated by your relationship to truth and fact in your work, which is a kind of fiction or autofiction or a kind of drawing from the self. How do you give yourself permission to invent? Are you always thinking about the reality, the-what-actually-happened truth, or what a poet pretentiously would call the ‘poetic truth’? In Collapse we read some really moving scenes, like the one with your brother decorating, and we hear conversations with your sister after your brother had died. How much of that is reality and immediately, in a documentary sense, true? Or how much of it is an emotional truth of something? Does it matter? Should it matter to a reader? **EL:** It doesn't have to matter for the reader. I mean, they can choose it to matter or not matter. And both are fine for me. They are two different ways of approaching the work, you know? It is like any book of autobiography – you can read Jean-Jacques Rousseau for the facts or read it for other reasons. And there is no “good” way of reading a book, of course. But for me it's not even a decision or a choice to work around the facts, or to choose the facts. It mostly comes from my personal story. When I was a child, as you know, people at school would call me a faggot and spit on me, and exclude me because of my homosexuality. I remember I was 11 or 12 years old but already thinking, “One day I will tell that story”, and to tell that story will be my revenge and my survival. And I had no idea about literature. I had never read any book. We didn't have any books at home. But very soon appeared for me this kind of connection between storytelling and surviving, this telling my story as a way to survive. As you know, because you know the history of literature better than I do, that’s why the autobiographical corpus in literature is full of people experiencing violence. From women to black people to concentration camp survivors to Primo Levi, Violette Leduc, Simone de Beauvoir, many gay people, Jean Genet, Edmund White, Andrew McMillan. Me and Edmund always together. *(AM note: I know I do not belong in that list, I think my inclusion is humorous, a wry aside, there is a smile that passes between É and me. I remember once writing in an essay that I had only ever been punched once, at random, by someone as I sat waiting for the bus. There is nothing in my life which compares to the violence endured by É – if we take violence to mean the physical act of harm, which I think is what we are thinking of here.)* A person I always quote is Salman Rushdie, who twice encountered hyper-violent things. First, when he got the fatwa against him, he wrote an autobiographical book, Joseph Anton. And then when he got attacked by a terrorist, he wrote Knife. So in two moments of hyper-violence, he had no choice but to become an autobiographical writer. So I became what Jacques Derrida, the philosopher, would call an autobiographical animal, you know, having no choice but to go this way. I tell the facts the way I know them and the way I record them. And so maybe they are full of mistakes. That's what's new in Collapse compared to my other books. It's a book about not knowing. It's a book about being wrong. It's a book about thinking you know the other, but eventually you don't. **AM:** And because of that... In Collapse, as you’re saying, there’s a new direction to the project. At the end of Monique Escapes, the latest book, which takes your mother as its central subject, you talk about this “commission” from your mum to write the book. As I understand it, you were struggling to write Collapse, and, your mum had the idea to write what became Monique Escapes, saying that she’d changed a lot since the last book you wrote about her. Did you find Collapse more difficult to write because you felt less certain about what you were writing? **EL:** Yeah, it was much, much, much more difficult. And I think the difficulty came from a mistake I made when I started writing it. Because when my mother called me one day to tell me that my brother had just died, that he was found on the floor of his kitchen at 38, I thought, oh, this is a pure sociological story of a working-class guy who dies from alcohol at 38 on the floor of his own kitchen alone. And I started to write the book this way, you know, with my sociological frame, with Karl Marx and Pierre Bourdieu and Didier Eribon in my mind… **AM**: So that he would be an example… **EL:** He would be the perfect example in the sad way, but he would be the extreme example. And then I started to reflect on my brother's life, and there was something not working in this frame. And I kept trying again and again, I wrote like 10 drafts, 11 drafts, 12 drafts, but the book was still as bad as in the beginning. One day I realised it was because my frame was wrong. Because as I say in the book – and this became the heart of the book – what characterised my brother was the fact that in his childhood and teenagehood and adulthood, his dreams were so big. And the thing is, in the working class of my childhood our dreams were framed by our social class… our dream was to get a big TV, to get a big fridge, to go to Disneyland once a year. In a way, dreams are framed by our position in the world, and it’s fine. My dreams now are framed by my position in the world. I want to be the best friend of Pedro Almodóvar. I want to watch movies with Isabel Huppert. You know, everything is due to the fact that I am this gay, intellectual guy, blah, blah, blah. Of course in my childhood we had, like, small escapes. They were not really dreams, but like, what if we win the lottery, or whatever. But my brother, he was dreaming so big. And he was dreaming of, you know, as I say in the book, becoming the biggest butcher in the world. He would open a butcher’s shop, and Madonna and Brad Pitt would come to his butcher's shop, and the paparazzi would take pictures, and the French president would welcome him to the Élysée Palace. And then he would rebuild the Cathedral of Notre-Dame. And then he would become a big real estate man. They were not just escapes, because he was training to do the things. He trained to become a butcher. He met someone who paid for him to train to get into real estate. **AM**: One of the heartbreaking things about it, as you say, is they're so specific. This kind of dream… it's not just “one day I'll be rich”, or “one day I'll win the lottery”, it’s “this man's going to pay for me to do this training”, or “I'm going to do this”. There was a plan. **EL:** Exactly… they were his projects, his way of throwing himself into the future. The day I realised how central they were in his life, that day I realised that my book was so wrong. Because that meant this book shouldn't be a book about social determinism like my books Who Killed My Father or The End of Eddy. It was a book about the failure of social determinism to frame the dream of my brother. My dreams in my childhood in The End of Eddy were framed. I was a little faggot who was bullied. and therefore my dream was to escape. It was not a free choice. I was just following what the world was dictating to me. You have to escape because you're a faggot and you're not welcome here. **AM:** In Change: A Method, you describe your journey away from where you were born to Paris and into the life that you have now. And I was thinking about social mobility in the UK, and just how much worse it's got, very rapidly actually. The systems that allowed my parents’ generation, for example, to have a certain kind of education I don't think would be possible now. Thinking about the French political scene at the minute, I wonder whether the journey that you were able to make, literally and socially, would that be harder now than it was then? I know it was still very hard for you. *I reflect here as I edit this piece about the recent death of David Hockney, about the slightly less recent death of Tony Harrison too; would such careers be possible for the likes of them now, born in Bradford, or born in Leeds? What do we need to put in place to ensure that not just a select few but all children have the capacity and capital and cultural knowledge to pursue art in whatever way they dream of?* **EL:** It's hard to say, but I know that some people in power are trying to make it harder now. They are trying to make it harder because they are cutting the number of teachers in France. They are closing schools and making it more difficult. Working-class kids far away in the countryside arrive at school and they're already exhausted because they come from the deep countryside where all the schools that were there were closed. The thing is my story is not the story of someone who escaped social determinism. It's someone who perfectly realised social determinism. Because social determinism is not only about class. Our social bodies are composed with class, but also with race, and also with gender, and also with the story of our country. And so the working-class gay kid who is bullied and therefore escapes because he has no choice then moves to the city to live his sexuality freely and study literature and fall in love with the art. It's a very classic, banal story, you know, in a way. And it was paved by the fact that my body is at the intersection of a class history, a sexual history, and, as you say, institutional or state history because I'm from a country in which, even if it's hard, it's possible for working-class kids to go to university because it's free in France to go to school because we had a lot of teachers… But now we have less and less. And in hyper-neoliberal countries like the UK or like the US, I don't know if my trajectory would have been possible. When I'm here and I listen about the stories that people tell me about the educational system here, about the health system here, I don't think I would have been writing in this country. **AM:** What is your relationship to time? Because we’re here in 2026, you're in London, you're going off to somewhere else after this, right? And you're traveling the world constantly and yet, through writing certainly Collapse, you had to live in a certain moment of your brother's death, but also look back to how that moment occurred. So you're kind of starting from a point, but then traveling backwards. In Monique Escapes, you're telling a story of your mum being able to leave an abusive relationship, and in a fairly linear way, but also you're looking back in order to be able to do that. These books are translated so we also always get them a couple of years after the French, and we’re here now talking, and then you're going to do an event tonight with Tash (Aw) aboutCollapse*,* so I just wonder where you feel you sit in time – because you’re both moving forwards but involved in a project that necessitates understanding one's own history… **EL:** First, I also wrote this autobiographical saga because the past is my favourite time, you know? As soon as present becomes past, I start loving it. Present time is a source of extreme nervous anxiety to me. The past is much more relaxing. And what I love with the past is that even the worst things, when they become past, can be reframed by our mind, by our storytelling, by the shape we give to them. *I think for me the past is not so relaxing, but I see in what É describes the instinct of the poet, one I share, to take what has happened, to use the poem as a space to consider it, to reframe it, to perhaps ultimately redeem it.* **EL:** In terms of time, the reason why I wanted to write this saga from The End of Eddy to Collapse is also because it's a saga about time. It's me writing through time and me writing about different times of the world I witnessed, this working-class milieu in the north of France. What I try to show from one book to the other is how much the characters change through time. My brother in Collapse is not my brother in Who Killed My Father or The End of Eddy. And my mother in Monique Escapes is not my mother in History of Violence. This dimension of life is something you can precisely capture only through a saga, through a body of work in which time is the subject, and all books are linked to the others. You know, when I started writing, when I wrote my first book, The End of Eddy, about how brutal my mother was and how much we didn't connect, I would have never guessed that eight years later I would write a book about me travelling with my mother, going to Germany to attend a play based on her life. I would have never thought that my mother would become friends with Catherine Deneuve as I wrote about in Women's Battles and Transformations. So I write also through my surprise at the changes and the things that happen in this process. And yeah, I think it's particularly visible when it comes to my mother because suddenly, you know, she went from hating me for writing my books to asking me to write more books about her and about my childhood and about the past, because suddenly she saw in this writing an opportunity to take her revenge against the invisibility that she suffered from during her whole life as a working-class woman in the north of France, and I started to see my work more and more as a revenge, but visibility as a revenge. **AM:** You’ve mentioned a couple of times as we’ve been chatting, that your work so far is almost a completed arc. Is that true? **EL:** Yes, it is. Collapse is the closing of the family saga. I will continue to write autobiographical books, but from very, very different perspectives, maybe about friendship, maybe about sexuality, maybe about very different things. Yeah, I had the impression that with all the characters that I have tried to depict, I have finished something that makes sense as a whole. **AM:** when you got to the end of Collapse, was it just a feeling of like – this is closed now, this circle is closed? **EL:** Something in me knew that it was closing this chapter, closing this saga. Also because for me there is this unpleasant feeling that people are waiting for you to surprise them, and after I published The End of Eddypeople would be like, ‘what next?’ you know, and I hated it, I hated to be transformed into a show for the cultural bourgeoisie… Then I thought, instead of surprising, I prefer to dig. That’s why Proust is one of my obsessions, or in a very different way, Jamaica Kincaid. When you read one Proust or one Kincaid after the other, you come back to the same place. It's not here to surprise you, it's digging and digging and digging. And then I thought, I will continue to dig this family and this milieu until I think it's finished. **AM:** Just to finish off, and thinking about Monique Escapes. One of the final phrases of it, if not the final line, is , “She was free”. And part of the tragedy of Collapsethat we've been thinking about is this dream of escape or freedom that just never can be realised or isn't achievable. So, from where you are now, What does “free” feel like to you? What is it to be free for you? **EM**: I know that it's just more difficult than I thought it would be. That's what I’ve learned during those years. As a gay child in the working class, I wanted to escape because I said I had no choice but to escape, and I thought one day I will escape, and on the other side everything will be beautiful and perfect. Of course, that's the way you think when you are young, and then you eventually, if you're lucky enough, you escape and you realise that you don't exactly have the freedom or the happiness or the easiness that you were longing for when you wanted to escape. And then everything becomes so difficult… So that is complicated, and that is something that I try to understand. *I leave the glass-window walls of the Penguin Random House Offices. Édouard goes into another room to talk to somebody else from another country. An hour later, the train departs and pulls me back to Manchester. Édouard goes off to his event and then onwards, elsewhere. Literature is just one ongoing conversation, between each other, between the past and the present, between who we were and who we fought to become, between who we are now and who we might be, sitting back in the same place, facing each other again, in two more years.* [Ghost![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/fc/56/fc56b9ab-b4c1-4291-8dc6-e491452ed510/content/images/icon/favicon-C_q1KHzv-577d00b8-c58d-412c-a6a0-d470a7fca57f.ico)Ghost](https://thebee.ghost.io/ghost/?ref=thebeemagazine.com#/signin)