Monique Escapes
A Novel
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- USD 12.99
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- USD 12.99
Descripción editorial
When Édouard’s mother reveals she is—not for the first time—enduring an abusive relationship, mother and son plot her next steps in what is at once an edge-of-the-seat escape narrative and a meditation on freedom and renewal.
Late one night, Édouard receives a telephone call from his mother. In tears, she tells him that her partner, her first since her abusive marriage to Édouard’s father ended, has been insulting and humiliating her. I thought this would be a new life for me and now it’s starting all over.
From afar, in Athens, Édouard swiftly sets a plan in place for Monique; the next morning, she leaves the apartment she has been sharing with the man. What takes shape over the next weeks, through phone calls and informal internet tutorials, on video chats and train rides, is a powerful and transformative shared experience for mother and son as they navigate the aftermath of male brutality, confront the limitations of class and society, and lay bare the pain of their past. With characteristic insight into society’s underpinnings and oversights, and with exquisite and tender portraiture, Édouard Louis’s Monique Escapes is a profound story of a woman—a mother—and a family’s search for more.
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.
