Édouard Louis on his new book "Crash": "My brother was homophobic, misogynistic and racist"

You often emphasize that writing is also a political act. Would you say that your brother's story is representative of many young men from precarious backgrounds?

Yes, definitely. But it was very difficult to portray someone like him. My brother was homophobic , misogynistic, and racist. Hardly anyone wants to talk about people like him these days. Even the left has a hard time because a person like that doesn't offer easy answers. While writing, I felt like I was writing against everyone: against the conservatives who ignore poverty. But also against my own side, the progressives, who don't know how to deal with a figure who was both a victim and victimized others. Who suffered so much and at the same time caused a lot of suffering.

Why was it important to you to write about working-class people?

Of course, there are many representations of working-class people, but they mostly come from the past. The world has changed, class has changed—we need new representations, new words, new images, new metaphors to talk about it.

Victor Hugo and [Émile] Zola wrote extensively about the working class in French literature, as did American authors such as Toni Morrison, [John] Steinbeck, and [William] Faulkner. But in the last 20 to 40 years, this has diminished. The neoliberal revolution devalued these people, made their lives invisible; class, precariousness, poverty, and social violence were hardly discussed anymore—both politically and literary. Today, we lack a contemporary representation of poverty, class, and social violence. I sensed precisely this lack—and I wrote against it.

Many depictions from the past or caricatured versions also serve no purpose. Comedies, for example, depict workers who suddenly win the lottery or move into a luxury hotel, and they seem ridiculous or out of place. Such caricatures replace reality with a lie, thereby rendering these people invisible.

So did you feel like you were writing not just a family story, but also about social failure?

Yes, definitely. I've always tried to make the world visible through my family's story—about my childhood and my homosexuality in my debut novel, about the lives of women in the book about my mother, about alcohol and violence in the book about my brother. Every book uses the family as a window to reveal larger social mechanisms.