“Monique escapes” by Édouard Louis, the luminous story of a rebirth

By freeing his mother from domestic slavery, the writer obtains from her the end of their own toxic relationship, and the material for a poignant story.

“HASh good? Am I important? » is surprised by Monique, 57, when the very brilliant and politically engaged Falk Richter asks her to come and say goodbye at the end of the show he dedicated to her, in the Grand Theater in Hamburg. An adaptation of Fights and metamorphoses of a woman, which Monique’s own son, Édouard Louis, wrote in 2021. Yes, it is important. And courageous, and strong. And the room gives him a standing ovation, a moving scene Monique escapes, Édouard Louis’ latest opus on his ravaged family. He tells how his mother finds the energy to leave a third companion, just as aggressive and alcoholic and homophobic as the first two. Despite the exhaustion of being insulted, held in domestic slavery since the age of 20; an inevitability of the women of his family, an inevitability of many poor women and poor couples.

Édouard Louis’ father was the second executioner, made miserable and wicked by a murderous liberal society (Who killed my father, 2018). In Fights and metamorphoses of a woman, Édouard Louis already recounted with tenderness and pride how Monique had freed herself, believing she would find with ” the other “, as she calls it, happiness in Paris. But everything had started again. At the beginning of Monique escapes, her son hears her crying on the phone. From Athens, where he is in a writer’s residence, he fears that she will be beaten, perhaps killed. He advises her to flee. And comes the story of a deliverance, of a rebirth. And a definitive reconciliation between mother and son.

All freedom has a price

Monique has long criticized Édouard for having darkened her childhood in their village in the North (Put an end to Eddy Bellegueule, 2014). Édouard accused his mother of being harsh for a long time and was ashamed of her for a long time. The escape that he organizes for her and pays for (the money matters) from Athens, the new life that he prepares for her with her older sister – with whom he has also reconnected – intensely reweaves the bond. “Why did I feel such a deep need to help him?” » he asks himself. Out of shame for his shame as a class defector towards his own people? Monique has long accused a literary career based on autofiction as a betrayal. But it was with the money earned from his books that he managed to finance his release, his son explains… All freedom has a price, all freedom is taken away by violence.

The political dimension is never absent from the works of Édouard Louis. He questions the absolute necessity of flight for some, and not for the privileged. On the violence that others carry despite themselves because they have only known it familyly and socially, and reproduce it endlessly. He almost feels empathy for this Other who hurt his mother so much. All innocent? At 31 years old, Édouard Louis reveals himself with an angelic and new compassion, in this story charged with emotion but admirably controlled, as brief as it is luminous, breathless and gentle, worried and soothed.

For the first time, he wrote to order when his mother suggested that he make a sequel to A woman’s struggles and metamorphoses. On the pretext that she had changed a lot. He then interrupted the work in progress on his older brother, who died of alcoholism at age 38, and admitted to having “ discovered the pleasure of writing in the service of another, of another […] the enchantment that comes with disappearance, erasure, becoming only a glance in the history of a destiny other than mine […]. Nothing in literature had ever given me so much joy. » And to join, from Proust to Romain Gary, the great lineage of sons who speak of mothers with such intuition. And disturbing and sentimental passion.