Who Killed My Father

by Édouard Louis

paradoxically, the poorer we were, the more money we spent for fear of not being like other people.

and I think you pretend to hate happiness in order to make yourself believe that, if your life seems an unhappy one, at least you’re the one who chose it.

At the age of seven, I shouldn’t have been crying over the car. I ought to have been thinking about my presents — that would have been the logical thing. Had you already taught me that we were the sort of people whom nobody would come to help? Had you already conveyed to me your sense of our place in the world?

That’s the trouble with stolen things, like you with your youth: we can never quite believe they are really ours, and so we have to keep stealing them forever. The theft never ends. You wanted to recapture your youth, to reclaim it, to resteal it. Only those who have always had everything given to them can truly feel what it is to possess. A sense of possession is not something one can acquire.

The other day a friend said, because I’d been talking about you, Your father doesn’t want to go into his past because the past reminds him that he could have become a different person, and didn’t. Maybe he’s right.

The whole day was a celebration. Among those who have everything, I have never seen a family go to the seashore just to celebrate a political decision, because for them politics changes almost nothing. This is something I realized when I went to live in Paris, far away from you: the ruling class may complain about a left-wing government, they may complain about a right-wing government, but no government ever ruins their digestion, no government ever breaks their backs, no government ever inspires a trip to the beach. Politics never changes their lives, at least not much. What’s strange, too, is that they’re the ones who engage in politics, though it has almost no effect on their lives. For the ruling class, in general, politics is a question of aesthetics: a way of seeing themselves, of seeing the world, of constructing a personality. For us it was life or death.