Edouard Louis details his "method" to "change"

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• Today, “Changer: method” by Edouard Louis, published on September 1, 2021 by Éditions du Seuil.

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by Edouard Louis, published on September 1, 2021 by Éditions du Seuil.

Her favorite quote:

"The following days, at each meal I tried to eat as Elena had shown me, the others ate and they thought I was doing the same but in reality when I ate I was working, I was learning a new one. body.

"

Why this book?

• Because this work is the story of a metamorphosis

  and the ruptures that accompany it, that of Eddy Bellegueule, a teenager from the working classes of northern France, to Edouard Louis, a bourgeois Parisian writer recognized throughout the world. It is the lucid and deeply political account of the gap between the world of his childhood and the privileged one to which he will reach but also that of revenge, of revenge even on a past which determined him not to get out of it. his village in the North of France, of poverty, lack of culture, insults and “queer” insults.

• Because it is first of all a slow progression before

  a founding moment: the decisive meeting with the philosopher and sociologist Didier Eribon who will reverse the trajectory of the author and allow him to take control of his career and his destiny. All it took was a lecture at the University of Amiens and a few words spoken soon after. Edouard Louis writes “my story resembled his - or rather that I would like it to resemble his and he answered me with a smile: so do it, transform your life. "

• Because this class defector's story begins with a sordid plan,

  the exercise of prostitution to be able to pay the dentist, and ends with the question of the search for lost time and appeasement by achieving the objectives of the 'writer. The efforts have paid off; Edouard succeeded but he must now get rid of the codes he has imbibed in order to become a bourgeois.

• Because the book is a weapon. Edouard Louis never stops

  looking for and seizing all the help he can get to carry out his project, starting with those from the men he meets and who love him. But it will be writing a book that will save him, he is convinced. The book is the medium which makes it possible to exist and to access recognition. Writing a book is "to prove to the world that I was someone and that the world was wrong to want to inferior me". It is to lay bare and "describe all that I had been strenuous to hide for years".

• Because Edouard Louis knows very well that his strength is his privilege,

  that of “having known life without privilege”.

  This strength and its ability to put to work to carry out its transformation through learning, culture, reading, entry to the Normal School, the ability to accept and seize the help that one offers him throughout his career.

• Because being bourgeois means having a beautiful set of teeth, a name

  that does not make people laugh as soon as you say it, to speak, to eat properly, to be educated, to go to the opera rather than hanging out in supermarkets. , read books, many books that allow you to emancipate yourself and get out of your condition.

  However, the class defector is not immune to sometimes being called to class order.

• Because it is touching and it questions this pugnacity in wanting

  to conform to a world, to imitate it, that of the cultivated Parisian bourgeoisie, of this young man who erases all traces of what he was: teeth I changed my first name in court, then my last name. I went to a clinic to redesign the line of my hair implantation, I dressed in a different way, which seemed to me better in my life. "

• Because there are also passages of magnificent sensuality:

  “So he said to me: I am a shark.

  (…) I felt his warm breath on the back of my neck.

  I thought: it's the breath of a shark.

  (…) Jean Genet says "erotic games discover an unspeakable world revealed by the nocturnal language of lovers".

  Such a language cannot be written.

  It is whispered in the ear at night, in a hoarse voice.

  "

  
  

The essentials in 2 minutes

The plot.

is the story of a personal odyssey, that of Edouard Louis who looks back on his trajectory, from the Picardy village of his childhood through Amiens where he learned the social codes of the bourgeoisie from his friend Elena then Paris and the whole world that opens up to him.

Characters.

 The author Edouard Louis, the friend and confidante Elena, his friends Didier Eribon, Geoffroy de Lagasnerie, Ludovic.

Places.

 Amiens, Paris, Barcelona, ​​the whole world.

The time.

 Contemporary.

The author.

 Edouard Louis is the author of several autobiographical books, all published at Le Seuil: 

(2014)

(2016),

(2018),

(2021) ).

This book was read with passion.

 "I love Edouard Louis, I admire him as an author, he lifts my heart and body, I was stunned by

, its radicalism, its literary style and its sincere, moving writing, uncompromising, political and heartbreaking.

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