A Woman's Battles and Transformations

March 1, 2022

"I did it. I left your father." So proclaimed French novelist Louis's mother in a phone call that ultimately inspired this novel, which follows the blistering international best sellers The End of Eddy and History of Violence. Here he writes not simply of one woman's liberation but of mother and sons, class and control, and how we are all ground down by society's strictures. With a 20,000-copy first printing.

Copyright 2022 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

May 16, 2022
In this penetrating work, French novelist Louis (History of Violence) turns a sharp yet forgiving gaze on the struggles of his mother, and the complicated bond he shared with her, “a coming together that started with our drifting apart.” Slipping seamlessly between lyrical and academic modes of storytelling, he offers more of an impressionistic study than a biography of his mother, sketching the story of her life around the dreams she was forced to give up: leaving hospitality school in the 1950s at age 17 to have her first child; remaining in an unhappy marriage to have a second child; fleeing from one alcoholic husband to another; and raising three additional children. Woven throughout the narrative of unrelenting misfortune are moments of liberation—culminating in his mother’s decision to leave the author’s father—alongside Louis’s own affecting account of grappling with his queerness (“What is a man? Virility, power, camaraderie with other boys? I never had any of that”), long a point of contention between mother and son. As he recounts the “fragments of tenderness” that eventually led them to reconcile, Louis delivers an incisive portrait of the ways oppression and social forces brought chaos to their lives, and how they found freedom through compassion. This slim account has serious substance.

June 15, 2022
A son bears witness to his mother's struggles. In a slim, tender memoir, novelist and editor Louis offers an empathetic portrait of his mother, who for 20 years lived with her abusive husband, "her life deformed and almost destroyed by misery and masculine violence." A lively young woman who hoped to become a chef, her dream was crushed when she became pregnant at 17 and married the baby's father, who turned out to be a drunk. Soon they had another child, but by the time she was 20, she had left him and married her second husband, Louis' father. He, too, was an alcoholic, cruel and demanding. "Nothing could happen unless it involved my father," Louis recalls. Over the years, she could imagine no way to leave her husband and children, but Louis could not understand her passivity. He was resentful and ashamed of her, refusing to confide his pain over being called a "faggot" by boys at school. He saw himself as a "dissident, monstrous child"--a loser, like his mother. "The first pages of this story," he writes, "could have been called: A Son's Struggle Not to Become a Son." As much as he later came to sympathize with her yearning "for the right to exist as a woman," as a boy, he treated her with condescension and cruelty. His violence, he admits with regret, was a form of "revenge against my childhood." When his mother was 45, long after Louis had left home to attend a lyc�e and university, she finally threw his father out. To support herself, she became a home health aide, a satisfying job that made her proud. She met a man and joined him in Paris, where Louis was living. He depicts her transformation into a happy, attractive woman, reveling in pleasure and hard-won freedom, as a gift to them both. A sensitive meditation on a woman's difficult life.

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July 1, 2022
Louis' autobiographical novel The End of Eddy (2017), the story of a gay boy's coming-of-age in working-class provincial France, became an international sensation, translated into 20 languages. This ravishing work of nonfiction starts with Louis describing a photo of his mother, Monique, smiling, before he was born: ""the vision of her happiness made me feel the injustice of her destruction."" This book is Louis' attempt to piece together his mother's life, to consider what he as her son has ignored, to write her a ""home in which she might take refuge."" Speaking sometimes directly to her, he recalls his entwined pleasure and fury that he kept her from knowing the bullying he experienced. He laments that Monique lost her own father young, married two men who treated her cruelly, and spent decades raising children with few resources, and celebrates her victories: taking a rare vacation, eventually leaving his father, meeting Catherine Deneuve. This one-sitting read, slim and complete, dazzles with memories sieved to their finest grains and affirms the extraordinary power of writing.

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Starred review from July 15, 2022

Like Louis's two novels, The End of Eddy and History of Violence, this short text is autobiographical, and like his previous work, sociological. The writing is intensely lyrical but the subject rubs up against the political. At 21, Louis edited a collection of studies on the controversial French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu (1930-2002). Bourdieu's themes--exclusion, domination, the cyclical, self-perpetuating nature of violence among the poor--play out in Louis's own narratives. Louis is trying to convey what it feels like to live life excluded, rejected by our classist consumerist society, but he argues his case in nonstandard form, as fiction (his novels) or memoir (this book). Sad but ultimately loving, this book is an apology directed to the mother he neither understood nor supported when he was young. She's in her 40s now. She left her abusive husband and though her new life isn't perfect, she's living like she never had a chance to before. In The End of Eddy, Louis wrote: "I have no happy memories from childhood." But maybe changes in circumstances can create those happinesses. VERDICT Moving and beautiful. The book falls between genres, so it may be slow to be picked up but is worth highlighting.--David Keymer

Copyright 2022 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.