A Woman’s Battles and Transformations
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  • Published: 7 July 2022
  • ISBN: 9781529902938
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: Audio Download

A Woman’s Battles and Transformations

Formats & editions
EBook
7 Jul 2022
Audiobook
7 Jul 2022
Paperback
7 Aug 2023
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A counterpoint to Who Killed My Father: a tender, radically personal-political account of Édouard Louis's mother's life

'Édouard Louis is one of the most important literary voices of his generation' Guardian
Everything started with a photo. To see her free, hurtling fulsomely towards the future, made me think back to the life she shared with my father. Seeing the photo reminded me that those twenty years of devastation were not anything natural but were the result of external forces - society, masculinity, my father - and that things could have been otherwise.
One day, Édouard Louis finds a photograph of his mother from twenty years ago. A picture of a happy young woman, full of hopes and dreams. Growing up, Édouard only knew his mother's sadness, as she found herself trapped in the humdrum life of a housewife, and her struggles against the dominant world of men. What happened in those years since the photo was taken?

Then, at the age of forty-five, his mother frees herself from this oppression. She leaves her husband and her old life behind, to start a new one in Paris.

A Woman's Battles and Transformations is Édouard Louis's most tender book yet. It reckons with the cruel systems that govern our lives, with politics and power - and with the possibility of escape. It is an exquisite and loving portrait of a mother, and an honouring of her self-discovery and liberation as she chooses to live on her own terms.

Translated from the French by Tash Aw

Praise for Who Killed My Father
'Louis speaks with an emotional authenticity and a stylistic confidence that is hard to ignore' Observer
'Édouard Louis is the vanguard of France's new generation of political writers' Evening Standard
'This short work tackles the intersections of class, gender and sexuality... Louis gives voice to the way the cruel, crude hegemony of masculinity has essentially destroyed his father's life' Guardian
'This valuable tale brings emotion to a discussion led by numbers, encouraging us to remember the real human lives affected by policy and political point-scoring' Financial Times
'To understand what is happening now in France, or indeed, all over Europe, this is an essential text' Irish Times
  • Published: 7 July 2022
  • ISBN: 9781529902938
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: Audio Download
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About the author

Edouard Louis

Édouard Louis is the author of two novels and the editor of a book on the social scientist Pierre Bourdieu. His work has appeared in the New York Times, the Guardian and Freeman’s. His first two novels, The End of Eddy and History of Violence, were translated into thirty languages, and have made him one of the most celebrated writers of his generation.

portrait photo of Edouard Louis

Also by Edouard Louis

The End of Eddy
Change
Who Killed My Father
History of Violence
See all

Praise for A Woman’s Battles and Transformations

Penetrating . . .Louis delivers an incisive portrait of the ways oppression and social forces brought chaos to their lives, and how they found freedom through compassion.

Publishers Weekly

Heartbreaking... You suspect this uniquely troubling writer is far from done yet.

Observer

Tash Aw's sensitive translation captures the vividness of Louis's voice... Movingly, the book demonstrates the pain that moving from one social class to another entails.

Times Literary Supplement

Louis's intimate narrative creates a pathway to understanding the complex, symbiotic nature between systems of power...Louis is in service to those overlooked by the privileged and an excellent role model for how men can become better allies to women.

The Brooklyn Rail

Louis' project, at once aesthetic and political, is..."to create a new language for the left", capable of articulating contemporary working-class experience.

New Statesman

The key to Louis's literary appeal is that he engages with complex themes while keeping things relatively simple. His elegant concision [...] ensures that candour never lapses into self-indulgence.

The Spectator

In his incandescent autofiction, Édouard Louis has remade his painful youth as literature...Louis' most hopeful book to date.

Los Angeles Times

Poetic, tender, joyous.

Guardian

A tenderness of observation... translated into English with unobtrusive flair by Tash Aw.

New York Times