**An autobiographical novel about growing up gay in a working-class town in Picardy.**Every morning in the bathroom I would repeat the same phrase to myself over and over again . . . *Today I m really gonna be a tough guy.* Growing up in a poor village in northern France, all Eddy Bellegueule wanted was to be a man in the eyes of his family and neighbors. But from childhood, he was different girlish, intellectually precocious, and attracted to other men.Already translated into twenty languages, *The End of Eddy* captures the violence and desperation of life in a French factory town. It is also a sensitive, universal portrait of boyhood and sexual awakening. Like Karl Ove Knausgaard or Edmund White, Edouard Louis writes from his own undisguised experience, but he writes with an openness and a compassionate intelligence that are all his own. The result a critical and popular triumph has made him the most celebrated French writer of his generation."words : 46532