Who Killed My Father

by Édouard Louis

What we call history is nothing but the story of the same emotions, the same joys, reproduced across bodies and time, and my mother experienced that same feeling of happiness when she threw you out of the house.

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.

Your life proves that we are not what we do, but rather that we are what we haven’t done, because the world, or society, stood in our way. Because verdicts, as Didier Eribon calls them, came crashing down on us — gay, trans, female, black, poor — and made certain lives, certain experiences, certain dreams, inaccessible to us.

You were ashamed because I was confronting you with a school culture that had excluded you, that had wanted you out. Where is history? The history they taught at school was not your own. We were learning world history, and you were left out.

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

A classic pattern: because you felt that you hadn’t lived your youth to the fullest, you spent your whole life trying to be young. 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.

I asked why you were laughing so hard, and you answered, between two laughs, You’re the damnedest kid I’ve ever seen, I don’t know how I could have made a kid like you. So I decided to laugh with you. We laughed together, clutching our bellies, side by side, for a very, very long time.

Jacques Chirac and Xavier Bertrand destroyed your intestines.

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.

Hollande, Valls, and El Khomri asphyxiated you.

He shows you the line — the violent line — between those who wear suits and those who wear tee shirts, between the rulers and the ruled, between those who have money and those who don’t, those who have everything and those who have nothing.

there are murderers who are never named for their murders.

It thinks the poor are too rich,