Writer - Edouard Louis
The Interview
BBC
4.3 • 537 Ratings
🗓️ 15 April 2019
⏱️ 23 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Every so often a writer emerges with a voice so original, distinctive and strong that it is heard far beyond the confines of the book buying public. HARDtalk’s Stephen Sackur speaks to Edouard Louis, who produced a raw, harrowing account of his own upbringing in a working class town in the north of France five years ago. Since then, he has written two more books drawn from his own experience of class, discrimination and violence in a fractured France. It’s tempting to see him as the voice of the gilets jaunes generation – is anger the fuel that propels him?
Image: Edouard Louis (Credit: Bertrand Rindoff Petroff/Getty Images)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | You're listening to a podcast from the BBC World Service. This is Hard Talk with me, Stephen Sacker. |
| 0:07.0 | Thanks for downloading this edition of the programme. I do hope you enjoy it. |
| 0:11.4 | Welcome to Hard Talk on the BBC World Service with me, Stephen Saker. My guest today became something of a literary sensation in France when he published a raw and shocking memoir of his own upbringing some five years ago. |
| 0:25.2 | At the time, Eduardo Louis was just 22. |
| 0:28.8 | Since then, he's written two more books, both also drawn from his experience as a young gay man brought up in a poor working-class town in northern France, who left home but |
| 0:39.8 | didn't really leave it behind. His portraits of a deeply divided, dysfunctional and unhappy France |
| 0:47.4 | have struck a chord. He sold hundreds of thousands of books, and in recent times he's become |
| 0:52.6 | a sort of literary inspiration for the |
| 0:55.2 | gillet-jone or yellow-vest protesters who've directed their populist fury at the government of |
| 1:01.9 | Emmanuel Macron. Is anger the fuel that propels the writing of Eduardo Louis? Well, he joins me now. |
| 1:13.3 | Welcome to Hard Talk. Thank you very much. |
| 1:21.5 | You were born and raised in a working class town in the north of France. You escaped as a teenager to make a new life. But it seems to me ever since then, you've been, in a sense, faced with this impulse to go back to make sense of |
| 1:31.0 | to understand your own past is that right yeah because you know i have the feeling that while i was |
| 1:38.8 | living my childhood i wasn't understanding it you know i was living kind of next to my childhood as a child. |
| 1:46.0 | And it's only when I took a distance with my past that I was suddenly able to understand it, you know? |
| 1:53.0 | For example, as a child, as I described in my last book, Who Killed My Father, |
| 1:57.0 | I hated my father because I thought that it was a bad person because of his homophobia, |
| 2:01.1 | because of his violent herges, because of his violent behaviors. |
| 2:05.1 | And it's only when I left the place that I was able to understand that his behavior, |
| 2:10.1 | what he was saying to me is his behavior towards gay people, toward women, |
| 2:15.1 | and everything was conditioned by something bigger than him, |
| 2:18.8 | by social force, by his place in the world. And it took for me a long time to understand it. |
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