MONIQUE ESCAPES

A successful author helps his mother make her final break from abusive men.

This short novel and the simultaneously released Collapse marks the conclusion of Louis’ autofictional saga about domestic abuse, sexuality, and class begun in The End of Eddy (2017). Here, the unnamed author’s 55-year-old mother, Monique, is desperate for help after years of enduring her partner’s alcoholic rages. The narrator is in Greece for a writing residency, but arranges for her to move temporarily into his Paris apartment while planning her next move. Inevitably, Monique’s crisis resurfaces his memories of abuse; it also forces him to reconnect with his sister, from whom he’s estranged for writing about ugly family secrets. Monique was infuriated with him, too, for a period; he recalls a time she appeared unannounced at one of his readings, a traumatizing experience for both. Still, he rationalizes, hasn’t his literary success writing about his family given him the means to help his mother move on? (“My hurt and hers are linked, because they’re twinned, without separation, without boundaries, I have no regrets because what had hurt her was me expressing my own hurt, I can’t regret it because without this common Hurt, this Hurt that is neither hers nor mine but entirely ours, none of what was happening…would have been possible,” he writes.) The novel weaves between the narrator assisting Monique with apartment-hunting in northern France and meditating on his family’s past. The history is ugly, and as ever, Louis is gifted at detailing abuse in plainspoken, powerful language. But this is also easily the most sunlit of Louis’ works of autofiction, emphasizing the idea that abuse is profoundly harmful, but is not destiny. “Talking over these tiny details moved me deeply, because they were the most tangible manifestation of her future freedom, because freedom is also a matter of details,” he writes.

A blunt study of damage with a well-earned glimmer of hope.