And that’s exactly what I say to myself at first when I see them
I say to myself
What a bunch of fucking faggots
Which is also a kind of relief
Maybe I’m not gay, maybe things aren’t the way I thought they were, maybe I’ve just always had a bourgeois body that was trapped in the world of my childhood
I don’t run across Fabrice, as he is in a different class,
but I’m not worried, I didn’t specifically want him, but what he represented.
I get to know Charles-Henri, and he becomes my best friend, I spend time with him
We talk about girls
Other people in our class say
Eddy and Charles-Henri, you never see one without the other
I love hearing them say that
I wish they’d say it more often, and louder,
that they’d go to my village.
and that they’d announce there, so that everyone could hear
Eddy has a best friend, a boy
They talk about girls, about basketball
(Charles-Henri was teaching me how to play)
They even play hockey
And yet I notice that Charles-Henri is beginning to slip away from me
There are other boys he has more fun with,
the ones who are as good at sports as he is, who have played forever
who play music, like he does
Who probably talk about girls better than I do
Holding on to his friendship is a battle
One morning,
it’s in December, two months into the school year
Some of the students are wearing Santa Claus hats
I’m wearing the jacket that we bought especially for me to take with me to high school
Bright red and yellow, an Airness jacket. I felt so proud when we bought it, my mother had said
quite proud herself
It’s your present to take to high school, it’s really expensive, we’re pinching pennies so we can afford it
But as soon as I got to high school, I realized that it didn’t fit in with the people here, that no one here wore things like that; the boys wore men’s coats or else wool jackets, like hippies wore
People found my jacket comical
Three days later, filled with shame, I threw it in a public trash can.
My mother will cry when I lie to her (I lost it).
We are gathered in the hallway, in front of the door to Room 117, waiting for the teacher, Mrs. Cotinet.
Someone walks up,
Tristan.
He calls out to me
Hey Eddy, as gay as ever?
Everyone laughs.
I laugh along with them.
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Édouard Louis, born Eddy Bellegueule in Hallencourt, France, in 1992, is the author of two novels and the editor of a scholarly work on the social scientist Pierre Bourdieu. He is the coauthor, with the philosopher Geoffroy de Lagasnerie, of the “Manifesto for an Intellectual and Political Counteroffensive,” published in English by the Los Angeles Review of Books. You can sign up for email updates here.
A NOTE ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR
Michael Lucey is a professor of French literature at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of Never Say I: Sexuality and the First Person in Colette, Gide, and Proust and The Misfit of the Family: Balzac and the Social Forms of Sexuality, and has translated Returning to Reims, by Didier Eribon. You can sign up for email updates here.
CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Epigraph
Book I. Picardy
An Encounter
My Father
Mannerisms
At School
Pain
A Man’s Role
Portrait of My Mother in the Morning
Portrait of My Mother from the Stories She Told
My Parents’ Bedroom
The Lives of Girls, Mothers, and Grandmothers
Village Stories
A Good Education
My Other Father
On Why Men Don’t Trust Doctors
Sylvain (An Eyewitness Account)
Book II. Failure and Flight
The Shed
After the Shed
Becoming
Laura
The Body’s Rebellion
A Final Attempt at Love: Sabrina
Disgust
A First Attempt at Flight
Strait Is the Gate
Epilogue
A Note About the Author
Copyright
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
18 West 18th Street, New York 10011
Copyright © 2014 by Éditions du Seuil
Translation copyright © 2017 by Michael Lucey
All rights reserved
Originally published in French in 2014 by Seuil, France, as En finir avec Eddy Bellegueule
English translation published in the United States by Farrar, Straus and Giroux
First American edition, 2017
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Louis, Édouard.|Lucey, Michael, 1960– translator.
Title: The end of Eddy: a novel / Édouard Louis; translated by Michael Lucey.
Other titles: En finir avec Eddy Bellegueule. English
Description: First American edition.|New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017.|First published in French as En finir avec Eddy Bellegueule (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2014).
Identifiers: LCCN 2016041340|ISBN 9780374266653 (hardback)|ISBN 9780374716394 (e-book)
Subjects: LCSH: Young men—Fiction.|Adolescence—Fiction.|Working poor—Fiction.|Gender identity—Fiction.|Gay men—Fiction.|Picardy (France)—Fiction.|BISAC: FICTION / Literary.|FICTION / Gay.|FICTION / Biographical.|GSAFD: Autobiographical fiction.
Classification: LCC PQ2712.O895 E513 2017|DDC 843/.92—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016041340
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The End of Eddy Page 14
