Who Killed My Father

by Édouard Louis

I spent my childhood longing for your absence.

Masculinity — don’t act like a girl, don’t be a faggot — meant that you dropped out as fast as you could to show everyone you were strong, as soon as you could to show you were rebellious, and so, as far as I can tell, constructing your masculinity meant depriving yourself of any other life, any other future, any other prospect that school might have opened up. Your manhood condemned you to poverty, to lack of money. Hatred of homosexuality = poverty.

there are those to whom youth is given and those who can only try desperately to steal it.

(I speak of you in the past tense because I don’t know you anymore. The present tense would be a lie.)

In general, when I look back on the past and our life together, what I remember most is what I didn’t tell you. My memories are of what didn’t take place.

They mean to save us by their vengeance, but they destroy us.

You said you had never known a kid as smart as I was. I had no idea that you thought all those things (that you loved me?). Why had you never told me?

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.

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.

Macron, Hollande, Valls, El Khomri, Hirsch, Sarkozy, Bertrand, Chirac. The history of your suffering bears these names. Your life story is the history of one person after another beating you down. The history of your body is the history of these names, one after another, destroying you. The history of your body stands as an accusation against political history.