Monique Escapes
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- €8.99
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- €8.99
Publisher Description
I freed myself from your father, I thought this would be a new life for me and now it’s starting all over, everything’s starting all over again.
The blazing new book from once-in-a-generation writer Édouard Louis, as he helps his mother escape from an abusive partner
SELECTED AS A BOOK TO READ FOR 2026 BY THE FINANCIAL TIMES AND NEW STATESMAN
One evening, during a writers’ residency in Athens, Édouard receives a tearful phone call from his mother, Monique. She tells him that the man she lives with in Paris is abusive, inflicting upon her the same drunken behaviour as Édouard’s father, repeating the same cycles of violence, shame and humiliation she fled from before.
Step by step, they plan her escape, celebrating each small victory of Monique’s new beginning. But how do you rebuild your life when you’ve never truly known freedom?
Monique Escapes is an intimate and gripping portrait of a mother fighting for her self-determination, and of the son who becomes her ally. It is a story of reinvention, the price of liberty and the remaking of the relationship between a mother and a son who, despite the weight of their shared history, manage to find each other again.
Translated by John Lambert
'One of the most important, politically vital and morally bracing writers of his generation' GUARDIAN
'I feel so lucky to be living and writing at the same time as Édouard Louis' MAGGIE NELSON
'One of the major writers of our time' GARTH GREENWELL
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Charged with purpose, this hard-hitting autofiction from Louis, which is being published simultaneously with Collapse, details the period in the author's late 20s when his mother, Monique, left her physically abusive third husband and began a new life as an independent woman. After managing her initial escape with the help of Louis and his siblings, Monique learns to operate a computer, purchases a small house in Paris, and confronts the distance between herself and her adult children, with whom she's experienced varying degrees of estrangement. In Louis's case, their break came with his first novel, The End of Eddy, in which he unsparingly depicted his home life with his father, a controlling drunk, which scandalized his mother. But as the second half of this novel makes clear, Louis is not out to hurt his mother, but rather to offer a clear-eyed view of their lives, even if it means examining why Monique might have been prone to reenact the trauma of each previous marriage with another violent husband. Louis also grapples with the limits of literature, wondering if it can make up for the world's pain. Uncommonly honest and deeply moving, this is an unvarnished record of a mother's disastrous relationships and redemption.
