“From my childhood I have no happy memories. I don’t mean to say that I never, in all those years, felt any happiness or joy. But suffering is all-consuming: it somehow gets rid of anything that doesn’t fit into its system.”
The End of Eddy – Édouard Louis
It’s tempting to read The End of Eddy as yet another entry in the minor literature of gay escape. A boy grows up in a homophobic backwater, gets beaten up at school, cross-dresses in secret, suffers the requisite crisis of voice, desire, and body, and eventually flees the scene by way of books, city lights and the train to Paris. But Édouard Louis—who was still calling himself Eddy Bellegueule when many of these scenes occurred—has written something more stark, more class-locked, and in its way more damning. The violence isn’t an aberration, and it isn’t even really about homosexuality. It’s about reproduction. What Louis documents is the ordinary brutality of the working-class family under conditions of social abandonment: the small acts of policing, resentment and conformity that accumulate, imperceptibly, into lives foreclosed from the start.
The End of Eddy emerged in the shadow of Didier Eribon’s Returning to Reims, and owes more than its dedication to that text. Eribon’s book, with its cool handling of shame, class disavowal and the hard rightward turn of the French working class, got under the skin of Le Pen’s France in ways few memoirs had managed. Louis picks up the same material and makes it bleed. If Reims dissects the processes by which intellectuals distance themselves from their origins, Eddy stages what it feels like to grow up with no distance at all.
Reading it again now, after reading and reviewing Claire Baglin’s On the Clock and while partway through Eribon’s latest on the death of his mother, the dominant mood is not one of resilience, but of depletion. Eddy is a book about exhaustion: the exhaustion of mothers, of children, of bodies, of dreams. His mother has five children, a husband with a broken back and an unmanageable temper, a life structured by the shifting regulations of the welfare office and the unpayable bills of rural precarity. She is perpetually furious. “She was a mother almost in spite of herself.” She chain-smokes through her son’s asthma attacks and tells him TV will help calm his nerves. He’s choking, and the solution is cartoons.
“She was a mother almost in spite of herself.”
The End of Eddy – Édouard Louis
The televisions are everywhere: four of them in a small house, each one salvaged from the dump and repaired by his father. “Television was something, like language or the ways we dressed, which was just taken for granted.” That detail is key. The television is not only a medium but a mechanism, of rhythm, routine, affect. It pacifies, it conditions, it sets the limits of thought. His mother can’t understand why, when he leaves home and lives alone, he doesn’t get one. “What do you do with yourself all day without a TV?” she asks, panic rising in her voice. Later she insists: “Turn on the cartoons, they’ll make you feel better, it’s relaxing before school.” He’s on the verge of a breakdown; she offers him Tom and Jerry. The tragedy isn’t just the mismatch—it’s that, for her, this is what care looks like.
Set against Baglin’s On the Clock, the significance of those repaired televisions becomes sharper. It’s the same logic at work: patch the object, endure the decline, keep things running even as they fall apart. The domestic infrastructure of the French underclass, like that of the British one, is held together by half-fixes and workarounds, “bodged” in the old sense. Repairs are not signs of resilience but evidence of abandonment. The family survives not through planning or progress but through a rolling emergency of taped-up plastic and salvaged screens. The flickering blue glow of the telly is both anaesthetic and symptom. The screen stays on, and that is what matters.
His father, like most of the men in Hallencourt, is violent in the way working-class patriarchs are permitted to be: directionless, routine, not quite shameful. He drinks, he punches walls, he tears into his son’s mannerisms with grim fatalism. He wants Eddy to be a tough guy—a “real man” like his cousins and brothers—and when that fails, he doesn’t so much rage as wither. There’s no epiphany, no crisis. Just a slow, mute terror. “I could feel the terror mounting in him,” Louis writes, “his powerlessness in the face of the monster he had created and whose oddity became clearer with each passing day.” It’s one of the most quietly devastating lines in the book. He isn’t afraid of Eddy’s difference, exactly—he’s afraid that everything he was meant to pass on is no longer transmissible.
The father doesn’t represent power, but its collapse. His authority is brittle, his body broken by factory work and untreated back pain, his world hemmed in by poverty and humiliation. When his own father dies, he celebrates. “He finally kicked the bucket, that piece of shit,” he says, and buys drink to toast the occasion. That’s as close as he gets to catharsis. Louis doesn’t present him as a monster, more a tired vector of inherited damage. His failure to beat masculinity into his son isn’t just personal; it’s systemic. He’s the broken relay in a long chain of reproduction, and the shame of that, the inarticulable loss of control, leaks out as rage, then silence.
Louis’s father still belongs to a recognisable script: the violent patriarch, the domestic sovereign whose rule is enforced through fists and silence. His authority is brutal but legible. In On the Clock, by contrast, the father figure has already dissolved. Claire Baglin’s narrator grows up in a household marked not by command but by absence, inertia. The father does not enforce gender norms, he barely enforces anything. Masculinity in On the Clock isn’t transmitted so much as ambient, absorbed through silence and observation. It resides in glances, in the mute hierarchy of the campsite, in the rituals of retreat and repair. The father’s body—worn down by factory work, already folding into the contours of the sofa—is not an instrument of discipline but a cautionary figure, a body that has endured rather than led. He does not pass down a model of manhood; he offers instead a kind of physical exhaustion, a refusal to speak, a hand permanently bandaged from failed salvage and repair. The narrator studies him not to emulate but to avoid. In this way, the baton of discipline does not move from father to daughter, but skips the family altogether, landing squarely in the hands of the workplace. It is the manager, not the parent, who polices posture, language, hygiene. The headset replaces the father’s voice. The rota becomes the new authority. Masculinity is no longer a household structure, it is outsourced, procedural, and enforced by HR.
If The End of Eddy captures the last gasp of the disciplinary household—TV humming in the corner, blood on the wall, the name passed down like a curse—then On the Clock picks up after that order has quietly folded. In Baglin’s world, the violence is no less real, but it’s dispersed, ambient, managed through scheduling apps and biometric scans. There are no fathers to fear, only managers.
In Louis’s Hallencourt, love is indistinguishable from damage. Mothers tell their sons to toughen up, to stop talking like girls. Fathers celebrate the death of their own fathers with drink and pork. Older brothers beat younger ones for showing softness. The school leads to the factory, the factory to the bar, the bar to the punch. Homosexuality functions less as a sexual identity than a kind of social contagion. “Faggot,” “fairy,” “pussy”—the words fall like blows. He’s asked to run by a group of boys who want to laugh at how he moves. He does. “You never get used to insults,” he writes, “but you do start to expect them.”
Even reading, even escape, is marked by ambivalence. At the École Normale, Louis lies about his teeth, about his background. He claims his parents were bohemian intellectuals who neglected his dental care in favour of literature. The reality was simpler: orthodontics were too expensive, and the pain was something you endured. What’s most disturbing is how plausible the lie sounds. It slips easily into the classed moral hierarchies of French liberalism. Aesthetic negligence is forgivable, poverty isn’t.
The book doesn’t ask for pity. It doesn’t even ask to be liked. There’s something cold, nearly surgical, about the way Louis lays out the material: the beatings, the spit, the economic calculations behind every familial decision. But beneath the flatness is a more difficult grief, not just over what was done, but over how little was possible. His mother has no time to be tender. She wants him to stay in school, not because education is liberating, but because the benefit office will cut her income if he leaves. “Mistakes,” he writes, “were the perfect realisation of how the system works.”
“Mistakes were the perfect realisation of how the system works.”
The End of Eddy – Édouard Louis
In that sense The End of Eddy is not a coming-of-age novel, nor a memoir of flight. It’s a case study in ideological formation. The family isn’t a haven, it’s a site of class reproduction. Care is conditional. Gender is mandatory. The television hums in the background, doing its job. You leave, if you can. You lie, if you have to. But you carry it all with you.
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