Die Freiheit einer Frau

“My mother has struggled with poverty and male violence her whole life.”

One day, Édouard Louis’ mother simply gets up and leaves. Away from the neighbourhood, away from her second husband, who, like the first, drinks and humiliates her.

In his new novel, Édouard Louis gives a voice to his mother, Monique Bellegueule, who grew up in precarious circumstances without professional training and was trapped in marriages with violent and alcoholic men. In this story of liberation, he talks unsparingly and lovingly about his mother and insistently and mercilessly about his desire to have a different mother as a child and his great happiness at seeing her as a liberated and happy woman today.

He sensitively and movingly traces her life story right up to the present day. At the same time, Louis reflects on his emotionally distant relationship with his mother from his earliest childhood. However, it is not only his mother who undergoes a metamorphosis, but also he himself, as he gradually draws closer to her again. She finally leaves her second husband, her family and her village and moves to Paris. Her son, who has now risen socially and is part of intellectual life in France, admires the fact that she has the strength and energy to finally lead the self-determined life she has long yearned for.

In the end, only two people know whether Monique Bellegueule and Cathérine Deneuve really did meet for a two or three cigarette conversation, as the mother tells her son. What counts in the end is the courage to set off into another life.