Change by Édouard Louis

Author:Édouard Louis
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

* * *

It took something as simple, as circumstantial as a guest lecture for my fate to change completely and irreversibly.

* * *

Something was happening inside me as I walked back at the end of the evening with Elena, something violent and unprecedented, my thoughts resumed Why haven’t I left? Everything Didier had said revived the pain, the bitter taste of the insults in my mouth, the pain of exclusion in the village, my father’s shame because my voice was too high, the way he lowered his eyes in embarrassment when I spoke in front of other people, all of this came back and I saw that I hadn’t escaped it, that my simply being in Amiens meant that I was still attached to my past and all that went with it. It’s true, why hadn’t it occurred to me before, I knew people who’d grown up in the village and now lived in Amiens, people who like me had left to come to the big provincial town, it was rare but not completely unheard of, I hadn’t escaped a thing. That evening, through the meeting with Didier and everything it made possible, I understood that my revenge had only just begun. If I really wanted to avenge the child I’d been, like Didier I had to go to Paris and do what he’d done: write books and gain worldwide recognition, that was what I said to myself. Hadn’t the child I’d been dreamed of speaking in front of audiences sitting in rapt attention—like Didier? Hadn’t I promised myself that one day I’d be famous and important, hadn’t I wanted the boys at school to see what I’d become and pay for what they’d done to me, to regret their acts and suffer from the gap between their lives and mine? Hadn’t I spent years as a child interviewing myself in front of the mirror in the morning to feel like I existed? Hadn’t I spent all the early years of my life watching people on television and dreaming of becoming visible in turn?

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