Who Killed ­ my Father ­ /Qui a tué mon Pére Who Killed ­ my Father ­ /Qui a tué mon Pére

Throughout my childhood, I hoped you would disappear.

This is what Édouard Louis wrote about his own father. But in the form of a novel, he has tried to understand his father, why he had become the man he was.

All his life, Louis has felt disgust for his violent, alcoholic, right-wing father. His homophobic outbursts traumatized him for life, and the bad memories lie deep within Édouard Louis. But when the French author in the novel Who Killed My Father? confronts his now seriously ill father, anger turns to compassion:

You can no longer drive, you can no longer drink, you can no longer shower without help, without it posing an enormous risk. You are a little over fifty. You belong to exactly the category of people for whom politics has envisaged a premature death.

From perpetrator to victim

The one he saw as a perpetrator has become a victim. The penchant for violence now seems to be more a consequence of continuous humiliation and social brutality. Using the destroyed body of his father as a starting point, Louis undertakes a defiant rewriting of France's recent political and social history. It is a chronicle of an ongoing murder, of a conscious mutilation as a result of neoliberal "reforms" and the brutal consequences of these for the workers, who are forced to experience this in their bodies. A polemical and rebellious pamphlet against oblivion, exclusion and physical violence in a class society - and at the same time an intimate declaration of love to a person who is almost impossible to love.