Writer Édouard Louis: Who Gets to Escape?

“The will of escaping is such a universal condition.” French writer Èdouard Louis shares how his brother's death turned into his latest novel, how class shapes possibilities and the importance of understanding what you hate.

Èdouard Louis’ brother is 38 when he dies. Louis describes his sibling as an alcoholic, and someone he hadn’t seen in 10 years: “I didn’t want to see him anymore. I didn’t want to talk to him. He was a very violent person,” Louis says frankly. “He was an unbearable person, someone you could not love. And I didn’t love him.” When their mother called Louis to tell him that his brother had passed, he turned to writing, because he thought he knew exactly why he died: “I thought my brother was the extreme realization of social determinism, of someone who was born in the working class, in poverty,” he says and continues: “This social determinism had such an extreme impact on him that it killed him at 38.” The book took many years to write, because through the process, Louis realised that everything he thought he knew was not exactly true.

His brother had dreams, like opening a butcher shop—a dream that Louis calls “real.” But even a “real” dream was not attainable for someone like his brother: “His dreams were too big for his milieu. His dreams were too big for his class.” Though growing up in the same class, the same town, the same family, Édouard Louis dreams of the big city, of culture and a new way of life all came true: “I was this young gay boy thinking: I am different and I want to escape, but the other ones don’t want to escape.” Louis had long seen himself as “different and superior because I wanted to escape. And that my brother was inferior because he was happy with his reality.”
“Everyone wanted to escape. But the thing is, not everyone had the same access to the tools of escaping,” Èdouard Louis says: “My brother was trying to escape with alcohol and with violence.” Louis continues to reflect on escaping, which essentially is what the book ‘Collapse’ is about: “It’s a question of unequal access to the, if not the means of production, then the means of expressing your feelings.”

While writing the book, Èdouard Louis reached out to his brother’s ex-girlfriend, whom he was all violent towards. But the girlfriends spoke deeply about their love for his brother: “I thought: do I take it out of the book because I don’t like this idea? Or do I let the reality with all this complexity?” Louis reflects: “If I take it out, it’s like patronising. I’m giving a version that I prefer of those women. They deserve to say what they have to say. At the same time, I disagree politically with what they say. So, I wrote this book in this kind of very precarious balance.”

“It’s our duty to understand what disgusts us, what frightens us, what we hate. We’d better look at what we hate.” For Èdouard Louis, change can’t be made by looking away from what we don’t like or understand. Only by understanding violence can it be stopped: “I am a toy of violence. I am an object of violence,” he says. “I’m talking because I went through it and have no choice.”

Édouard Louis (b. 1992) was born Eddy Bellegueule in Northern France. He graduated in sociology and philosophy from the École Normale Supérieure and the École des Hautes Études et Science Sociales. and thus has an academic education as the first in his family. Louis had his debut in 2014 with the award-winning bestseller The End of Eddy Bellegueule. He has published seven novels and has also been editor of works on Pierre Bourdieu and Michel Foucault. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, and Freeman’s. His books have been translated into thirty languages, making him one of the most celebrated writers of his generation worldwide.

Èdouard Louis was interviewed by journalist Bodil Skovgaard Nielsen on stage at Louisiana Literature at Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, August 2025.

Camera: Jakob Solbakken, Rasmus Quistgaard and Simon Weyhe
Produced and edited by Roxanne Bagheshirin Lærkesen
Copyright: Louisiana Channel, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, 2025

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