Louis opened the door to the apartment at the top of the
Tour Perret, the only skyscraper in the northern French
city of Amiens. He said hello warmly before resuming his
position in front of a large window, which looked onto
a boulevard that cut through town and then vanished
into green fi elds. The apartment belonged to someone
called Noppe, who must have been an amateur artist and
collector with a nostalgic idea of globe-trotting. On one
wall hung a painting that bore the owner’s name, which
somewhat stereotypically depicted four African masks
suspended in a cloud of hieroglyphs; across from it stood
a display case containing regional glassware and a num-
ber of vintage die-cast cars. Louis was in the midst of a
preliminary shoot for a documentary with the working
title ‘‘Édouard Louis, or the Transformation,’’ and the fi lm-
maker, François Caillat, had rented the apartment for its
views. ‘‘Now you have Amiens at your feet,’’ Caillat said.
‘‘When you arrived, it wasn’t like that.’’
A cameraman and a sound operator closed in on Louis
as Caillat positioned him. They requested a sound test,
and Louis, who attended a performing-arts high school
in Amiens, sang a short tune, an old song by the ’70s
French pop star Daniel Balavoine called ‘‘The Singer’’:
‘‘I want to succeed in life, be loved, be beautiful, earn
money/Above all be intelligent/But for all that, it’s a
full-time job.’’
At 28, Louis is tall, statuesque, with sharp, angular fea-
tures. He is also one of France’s most widely read and
internationally successful novelists. He seems, however, to
have skirted the complicated psychological dynamics that
youthful fame can infl ict. His sentences are punctuated
with a lighthearted, reassuring laugh. Occasionally, you
could see the drama student’s checklist reel through his
mind: He would straighten his spine, press his shoulders
back and down as he looked into the camera. Caillat asked
if he could swing open the giant window to fi lm Louis
leaning out over town. Louis concurred, though with a
faint cry of protest: ‘‘I’m not at all the type of person to
open a window,’’ he said.
The boundaries of the self are central to the three novels that Louis has
published since 2014, and perhaps even more central to understanding the
prodigious reception they’ve had in France. His fi rst novel, ‘‘The End of
Eddy,’’ became an international best seller and has been most accurately
described as a ‘‘nonfi ction novel.’’ In it, Louis recounted the desolate poverty
he experienced growing up in the tiny village of Hallencourt, 20 miles from
Amiens, in the remote reaches of France’s postindustrial north. ‘‘It was a
literary bomb,’’ the philosopher and sociologist Didier Eribon, a close friend
of Louis’s, told me, that upset the routine ‘‘navel-gazing of the cultural bour-
geoisie.’’ Since then, some in France have questioned whether this precocious
award-winning author, whose works have been translated into two dozen
languages and adapted for the stage by Europe’s most prestigious directors,
is really qualifi ed to speak for those he left behind. Louis, in turn, likes to fl ip
the question around: Had he not left Hallencourt, received the best education
available in France and altered the way he spoke, ate and dressed, would
French literary circles have expressed such profuse empathy toward him?
Would they have cared at all?
Louis arrived in Amiens after fl eeing the cruelty of life as a closeted teen-
ager in Hallencourt. ‘‘I had no previous experience of being in a city,’’ Louis
said to the camera. Caillat, looking like an American tourist in slouchy kha-
kis and a striped polo shirt, asked him what it had been like for him to live
there. ‘‘I remember a rainy city, with a certain architecture, which I think
constitutes part of what I am,’’ Louis said. Though it was late summer, the
sky was accommodatingly pale. ‘‘The bricks of the north and the gray sky,
it’s a kind of radicality of melancholy.’’ Five years later, Louis left for Paris to
attend graduate school and only then felt suffi ciently at ease with himself and
his social environment to come out publicly. ‘‘It’s strange, because Amiens,
for me.... ’’ He trailed off. ‘‘Often when you try to reinvent yourself, there are
intermediary places in the reinvention of the self,’’ he said. ‘‘You think it’s a
place of arrival, but in fact it turns out to be a place of departure.’’
Louis is seen primarily as a literary fi gure in France, but he studied
sociology in Paris at the École Normale Supérieure, perhaps France’s most
hallowed institution of advanced education; many of the closest members
of his circle are social scientists. In fact, Louis and Caillat fi rst met fi ve years
earlier, when Louis worked as a consultant on a fi lm that Caillat made about
Michel Foucault, the iconic philosopher (a concept that might only exist in
France). A year before Louis achieved broader fame, he published his fi rst
book, a collection of essays that he commissioned and edited on Pierre
Bourdieu, the French sociologist of social class.
Louis has a way of making all conversation feel like a late-night cram
session for a fi nal exam on 20th-century Continental philosophy; a heady
excitement lurks in everything he says, often culminating in a considered
appraisal of how a certain theory explains a particular emotion or behav-
ior. Caillat observed that Louis was the opposite of the traditional French
hero fi gure, who feels that he is destined for something greater than the
conditions of his birth. ‘‘People tell me I’m diff erent,’’ Louis said, ‘‘but I
didn’t want to be diff erent — I was forced to in spite of myself. I wasn’t
born diff erent, I became diff erent.’’
After half an hour, Caillat decided to move outside into the street
to shoot a few city scenes. Filming would continue in front of Louis’s
high school, a few blocks away. As the crew packed up, Louis scooped
up a plastic bag containing hair gel and a tiny blue earring that he’d
removed for the camera. A rectangular dish of potpourri on the kitchen
table had become crooked, and Louis attentively straightened it before
heading for the door. The crew squeezed into the elevator, leaving space
for one more body, and at Louis’s insistence I wedged myself in. Louis
disappeared into the stairwell, calling out that he would meet us in the
lobby, 23 fl ights down.‘PEOPLE TELL ME
I’M DIFFERENT,
BUT I DIDN’T WANT TO
BE DIFFERENT —
I WAS FORCED TO.’
ÉDOUARD
50 4.5.20