Writer’s Note
Begun when Édouard Louis was 18 and
published in 2014 when he was only 21, The
End of Eddy is his account of growing up poor
and, in his words, ‘visibly gay’ in rural France.
It’s a world away from my own youth in 70s and
80s Lancashire. But even so, as a mixed-race
girl in a white community and distanced from
my family background by way of education, I
recognise aspects of my own experience in
Louis’. And whilst the book was written with an
older audience in mind, I’m sure many people
closer to Louis’ age will recognise themselves
or someone they know in his story also. This
feels like the right time to be sharing it with
young adult audiences as theatre.
Eddy grows up in a working class village with
a deep-rooted identity of self-sufficiency and
machismo forged through decades of manual
labour and economic hardship. From the age
of 10, Eddy is relentlessly bullied, verbally and
physically. Trying to be a ‘real man’ and failing,
he stakes his survival on escaping the village
by winning a scholarship to study theatre.
He’s 15 when he leaves home. Beyond the
time frame of this book we know he’ll study
sociology at university, change his name and
publish three autobiographical books by the
time he’s 25.
All of which might make The End of Eddy sound
like a cliché of a rags-to-riches memoir. But
Louis’ project is as political as it’s personal.
He’s writing to make his individual suffering a
public conversation about class. He wants the
liberal establishment to begin to understand