Louis is seen primarily as a literary figure 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. “You think it’s a place of arrival, but in fact it turns out to be a place of departure.” “Often when you try to reinvent yourself, there are intermediary places in the reinvention of the self,” he said. “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 sufficiently at ease with himself and his social environment to come out publicly.
Though it was late summer, the sky was accommodatingly pale. “I remember a rainy city, with a certain architecture, which I think constitutes part of what I am,” Louis said. Caillat, looking like an American tourist in slouchy khakis and a striped polo shirt, asked him what it had been like for him to live there. “I had no previous experience of being in a city,” Louis said to the camera. Louis arrived in Amiens after fleeing the cruelty of life as a closeted teenager in Hallencourt. Louis, in turn, likes to flip 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? “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 bourgeoisie.” 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 qualified to speak for those he left behind. His first novel, “The End of Eddy,” became an international best seller and has been most accurately described as a “nonfiction 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. 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. Louis concurred, though with a faint cry of protest: “I’m not at all the type of person to open a window,” he said. Caillat asked if he could swing open the giant window to film Louis leaning out over town. 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. His sentences are punctuated with a lighthearted, reassuring laugh. He seems, however, to have skirted the complicated psychological dynamics that youthful fame can inflict. He is also one of France’s most widely read and internationally successful novelists. 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.”Īt 28, Louis is tall, statuesque, with sharp, angular features. “When you arrived, it wasn’t like that.”Ī cameraman and a sound operator closed in on Louis as Caillat positioned him. “Now you have Amiens at your feet,” Caillat said. Louis was in the midst of a preliminary shoot for a documentary with the working title “Édouard Louis, or the Transformation,” and the filmmaker, François Caillat, had rented the apartment for its views. 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 number of vintage die-cast cars. The apartment belonged to someone called Noppe, who must have been an amateur artist and collector with a nostalgic idea of globe-trotting. 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 fields.
Édouard Louis opened the door to the apartment at the top of the Tour Perret, the only skyscraper in the northern French city of Amiens.
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