The End of Eddy Read online

  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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