“Since you made this book, I have changed a lot again. You’ll have to write it down one day! I transformed again. ” Three years later Fights and metamorphoses of a womanresponding to the “command” of the one who gave him life, Édouard Louis dedicates a new book to his courageous mother: Monique escapes.
A woman in her fifties finds the strength to leave a third violent and alcoholic man. “I freed myself from your father, I thought it would be a new life for me and now everything is starting again, everything is starting the same again. » As he knows how to do so well, Édouard Louis analyzes the ins and outs of this rupture. Making himself “the archaeologist of [s] “mother”, the author dissects the multiple intimate and social, physical and economic violence, the class inequalities and the power relations which made the “escape” necessary. “The story I tell is not a praise of flight,” he explains. I can already see you coming: How beautiful the escape is! What a courageous woman! But you are wrong. […] Because flight is a burden. And much later perhaps it generates Beauty. »
While the mother took refuge in her son’s apartment in Paris, the latter is in Athens for a writing residency. From Greece, Édouard Louis orders meals for Monique every day. This is how he learns that she has never tasted Lebanese cuisine. “The exclusion that had formed the substance of her life was played out in details so tiny, so tiny, I thought while listening to her: at more than fifty years old she has never yet experienced certain flavors, never experienced certain taste sensations , as a form of culinary and sensory dispossession. »
In this careful language to which he has accustomed us since Put an end to Eddy Bellegueule, published ten years ago, a prose whose precision is never ostentatious, the author shows and feels everything that kept Monique in submission. He also takes the opportunity to name his privileges, recognizing that it is thanks to the money his books have earned him that he is able to help his mother. “What she had experienced as violence against her was today what would allow her to free herself from violence. »
Paradoxically, while the premise is serious, it bluntly exposes the life of a woman “kept at home by men”, Édouard Louis gives here his most luminous book. More than ever, the author engages in the territory of joy, embraces the immense happiness that rebelliousness and freedom provokes. In this book full of laughter and first times, based on validation and recognition, the mediating and cathartic force of art appears in all its splendor. When Fights and metamorphoses of a woman becomes a theater show directed by Falk Richter in Hamburg, Monique, receiving a long standing ovation, realizes its “importance” and that of her journey. In this crucial stage of his mother’s emancipation, a decisive day in his journey towards a new life, Édouard Louis sees a well-deserved revenge. “If freedom is not revenge,” he writes, “then it is not freedom, that is what I believe. »