The End of Eddy

Eddy Bellegueule grows up in Hallencourt, a poor village in northern France marked by unemployment, alcohol, and a brutal code of masculinity. From his earliest years he is bullied for being effeminate, and he watches his family absorb the violence of their own poverty, his father broken by factory work and drink, his mother worn down by raising children on nothing. Louis draws the book directly from his own life, naming every detail of the bullying, the shame, and the desire to escape, while refusing to turn the people who hurt him into simple monsters. The result is a portrait of how class and queerness can be punished in the same breath.