While I was familiar with Édouard Louis and his memoir “The End of Eddy,” this was my first exposure to his writing. I found “Changes” to be a riveting and reflective exploration of a tough life, largely defined by a desire to escape and reinvent. Much of the novel is about Édouard’s life after leaving his hometown to attend school—and later his move to Paris to attend university. He is fleeing from poverty, ignorance, and homophobia but his feelings about his younger life are complicated—and not all bad. After he leaves home, he is continually remaking who he wants to be and the degree to which he wants to run away from his past and even the new life that he shapes for himself upon initially leaving home. At times, he experiences moments of “becoming” but is always searching for more and trying to understand his relationship to his past. I found this novel to be a beautiful, affecting, and poignant exploration of the degree to which we can truly reinvent ourselves and escape the vestiges of our past lives, even when we desperately need to.

Louis is a bright voice in French contemporary writing, and I am always pleased to see a new volume of his. His approach to history, memory and cultural critique is extremely nuanced and empathetic, and I often am blown away by his commitment to humanizing characters who would otherwise be one-dimensional.

This was excellent and as engaging as his previous works-perhaps more so as it moves through more if his life than say 'A History of Violence'. Increasing Louis' writing reminds me of Annie Ernaux-the way of viewing and reviewing the past and the gulf between our past lives an the present. It also makes the reader reflect that it is class of the perception of one's class that is more definitive than any other factor and the myriad of encoded ways (sparkling water over still) that class is encoded. I was struck to at the honesty and lack of shame in the prose and the ways in which this challenges the reader's in-built prejudices over sex work (for example). Additionally the use of 'You' (much of the book is addressed to his father) created an intimacy with the reader- we feel like we are in an ongoing reflective conversation.
Ultimately it is a novel about growing up and the shedding of past selves, of transformations-and the pain of those transformations, and the reality that our past selves still inhabit us like so many ghosts. Louis' narrator speaks about himself with little pity and some dislike but we do feel for him and for the child who felt so out of place and unable to articulate his 'true self'.

In his fourth memoir, Édouard Louis reflects on his experiences growing up gay in provincial poverty. After leaving his down-and-out village where few graduate, Louis enters a theatre school in the town of Amiens where he is confronted by a world of alien customs. His friends all eat healthy snacks; their mothers don't smoke in the house; they read literature and talk about current politics. At his own home—a contrasting picture of desolate poverty—his father drinks beer every night, his mother endlessly smokes in his room, and he is constantly ridiculed as effeminate, the target of every homophobic slur. This memoir traces the obsessive attempts Louis makes in order to acquire the habits and manners of the bourgeoisie and to escape from his origins: altering his accent, ridding himself of his cheap hoodies, engaging in leftwing demonstrations, fixing his teeth, and finally, changing his name "Eddy" (so American, so gauche) to the more refined Édouard (so classic, so debonair). His education is more than just a curricular achievement—it is an entire transformation of his speech and body. As he leaves for Amiens and then later for Paris, to study at the École normale supérieure, Louis advances higher up the echelons of French society—from middle-class houses to aristocratic villas, schmoozing with writers and politicians and bankers who decorate their apartments with polar-bear rugs. Ironically, his gay identity doesn't mark him out as a transgressive outsider; his homosexuality is what allows him to become bourgeois.

I will read all of Édouard Louis' books but I felt that this was the least successful. It is sometimes full of banal platitudes ("I realized that knowledge=power") and, in way that feels rote, it applies familiar sociological concepts to the familiar material of his life. But there are still moments of poignance. I was touched by his memory of how he would, as a teenager, he would fantasize about a trucker picking him up and asking him to touch his cock. But when this very thing happens to his sister and she comes home crying, he is irrationally full of jealousy—to her it is sexual harassment; to him, the event "defines the contours of his fantasies". In the end, Louis meticulously mines and sieves every detail from the memories of his adolescence, but this memoir feels flatter than his previous ones.

Thanks to Netgalley and FSG for the ebook. You always wonder how someone born into desperate poverty can turn their life around. This book tells that exact story and for this author it starts through a life or death desire to escape. But beyond that desire, and true of many success stories, is the ever growing list of people who take you under their wing and show you how the world works. And that includes things big and small: What to read, which fork to use at dinner, paying to fix your teeth, change your obnoxious laugh, how to fill out your college essay, give you a free place to live. It’s humbling to give yourself over to others, until the day you look up and see that you’ve actually become your own person.