What is the price of freedom? Not in a symbolic way, but what does it really cost?
This is the fundamental question that Édouard Louis asks in his latest book, Monique escapeswhere he recounts his mother’s second flight, after detailing it three years ago, in Fights and metamorphoses of a womanhow she ended an unhappy marriage with her husband at 45, and reconnected with her son.
However, ten years later, after starting a new life with another man, she finds herself in the same situation: it is also an alcoholic spouse who mistreats her, which makes the author say: “There is beings carried by life and others who must fight against it. Those who belong to the second category are tired. »
Once again, this modest woman, mother of five children, must start from scratch, because by following her new partner to Paris, she has lost all her bearings and is financially dependent on this man. But this time it’s different, his son can help him. In fact, Édouard Louis literally becomes the accomplice of this escape which excites him as much if not more than her, and this book is in some way a commission from his mother who points out to him that since Fights and metamorphoses of a womanshe has changed again.
Is this a way for him to redeem himself for having hurt her with his first book where he spared no one, by telling how he grew up in an environment where poverty, alcohol and homophobia reigned? He notes, however, that it is with the money from his books that he can now finance his release.
What she saw as a betrayal was what allowed us to face the present. What she had experienced as violence against her was today what would allow her to free herself from violence.
Edward Louis
Monique escapeswhose title is inspired by the book Eve escapes by Hélène Cixous, is perhaps the most optimistic book by Édouard Louis, who confesses that “nothing in literature [lui avait] never brought so much joy”, because “through it, I discovered the pleasure of writing in the service of another. I learned the enchantment that disappearance, erasure provides, the fact of becoming only a look in the history of a destiny other than mine”, which recalls the approach of Emmanuel Carrère, the author of Other lives than mine.
The writer had initially thought of writing a book which would have taken the form of a document “as common as an invoice”, but this would not have demonstrated what this escape really required. In a writing residency in Greece, Édouard Louis mobilizes everything he can from afar to help his mother to whom he lends her apartment, in addition to sending her cooked meals; he even reconnects with his sister who hasn’t spoken to him since his first book, Put an end to Eddy Bellegueulewith whom he is looking for a new roof, new furniture, movers, etc.
It becomes a real undertaking, which obsesses him: “Everything else seems futile to me today in comparison to this thing: life, its possibility”.
Through this plan that they organize together, many moving moments, notably when Monique sees her life brought to the stage in an adaptation of Fights and metamorphoses of a woman, in Hamburg, where she will receive a standing ovation. She had never been on a plane. “All these things we were about to do together would be for her a succession of First Times,” he writes. A war against an army of Nevers. »
Édouard Louis evokes the famous A room of one’s own by Virginia Woolf who said that to write, a woman needed a place and a small income. “A room, a space, walls, a key, money: this is also, a hundred years later, what my mother needed, not to become a writer, but to become a more mature woman. free and happier. Woolf had understood, a hundred years earlier, that freedom is not primarily an aesthetic and symbolic issue, but a material and practical issue. »
When we ask ourselves why a woman does not leave an abusive partner, do we also think about the means this requires?
In a toxic relationship, there is not only the psychological influence, there is also the economic influence, the lack of confidence if you do not have training or a job, so many things in fact that can slow down emancipation, including, let’s not forget, women’s shelters which are overflowing, and which some governments sometimes consider too expensive…
This is why Édouard Louis asks these judicious questions: “Would it be possible to establish something like a price of freedom, a price that can be quantified rationally, mathematically? Would that once this price was fixed and made accessible to as many people as possible, new escapes would arise and multiply endlessly? To put it more explicitly and therefore more brutally: how many people, how many women would change their lives if they got a check? »
Monique escapes
Threshold
180 pages