This bracing new nonfiction book by the young superstar Édouard Louis is both a searing j’accuse of the viciously entrenched French class system and a wrenchingly tender love letter to his father
Who Killed My Father rips into France’s long neglect of the working class and its overt contempt for the poor, accusing the complacent French―at the minimum―of negligent homicide.
The author goes to visit the ugly gray town of his childhood to see his dying father, barely fifty years old, who can hardly walk or breathe:“You belong to the category of humans whom politics consigns to an early death.” It’s as simple as that.
But hand in hand with searing, specific denunciations are tender passages of a love between father and son, once damaged by shame, poverty and homophobia. Yet tenderness reconciles them, even as the state is killing off his father. Louis goes after the French system with bare knuckles but turns to his long-alienated father with open arms: this passionate combination makes Who Killed My Father a heartbreaking book.
"Canny, brilliant: a devastating emotional force."
― Garth Greenwell, The New Yorker
"Whatever one’s politics, readers of this impassioned work are likely to be moved by the Louis family’s plight and the love, however strained, between the author and his father."
― Kirkus
"Who Killed My Father is a political document that uses the force of memoir ― incisive, confessional personal details ― to bolster its argument that Louis’s father’s life (and by extension, his family) was ruined by politics. Compelling."
― Kevin O'Rourke, Los Angeles Review of Books
"From Jacques Chirac to Emmanuel Macron, Louis blames for his father’s ills, for the misery that produced him and so many like him, men seen in the newspapers recently, demonstrating in the streets of Paris and other French cities, wearing gilets jaunes."
― Lauren Elkin, The Guardian
"Louis unpacks the reality of shame, by examining over and again what has gone on between himself and his father. His sentences narrow in, Beckett-like, on the texture of the life he left behind."
― Tim Adams, The Guardian
