Reader Score
80%
80% of readers
recommend this book
An autobiographical novel about growing up gay in a working-class town in Picardy.
"Every morning in the bathroom I would repeat the same phrase to myself over and over again . . . Today I'm really gonna be a tough guy." Growing up in a poor village in northern France, all Eddy Bellegueule wanted was to be a man in the eyes of his family and neighbors. But from childhood, he was different--"girlish," intellectually precocious, and attracted to other men. Already translated into twenty-nine languages, The End of Eddy captures the violence and desperation of life in a French factory town. It is also a sensitive, universal portrait of boyhood and sexual awakening. Like Karl Ove Knausgaard or Edmund White, Édouard Louis writes from his own undisguised experience, but he writes with an openness and a compassionate intelligence that are all his own. The result--a critical and popular triumph--has made him the most celebrated French writer of his generation."The Hillbilly Elegy of France . . . The End of Eddy, however, is not just a remarkable ethnography. It is also a mesmerizing story about difference and adolescence, one that is far more realistic than most." --Jennifer Senior, The New York Times
"Canny . . . brilliant . . . a devastating emotional force." --Garth Greenwell, The New Yorker "Louis' account of growing up gay and poor in a working-class village isn't only a story about France. Just released in a highly readable translation by Michael Lucey, this painfully insightful tale of entrapment and escape could've easily been set in Michigan or West Virginia . . . While Eddy's parents are both vivid characters--Louis has a great ear for their patois--what makes the novel special is the way it expands outward." --John Powers, NPR's Fresh Air