In 2013, the year before the release of his debut novel, the twenty-one-year-old French writer Eddy Bellegueule changed his name to the more literary — and, in France, regal — Édouard Louis. More than a personal reinvention, this change marked for the author a symbolic revolution: the son of a factory worker from northern France was legitimizing himself for the literary salons of Paris. When his autobiographical coming-of-age novel, En finir avec Eddy Bellegueule (translated as The End of Eddy), was released the following year, Louis was seized on by the publishing industry as a precocious talent, and the novel was quickly translated into more than twenty languages.

But among some critics, questions remained regarding Louis’s working-class background and his novelistic treatment of those who had raised him. Louis, who is gay, had been unsparing in his depiction of his family and neighbors’ homophobia toward him, and unflinching in his portrayal of the sexual violence, domestic violence, xenophobia, and racism he witnessed growing up. Critics on both the Left and the Right questioned whether the young author had exaggerated his account in order to make it rich, and labeled him a transfuge, an upstart or defector — a class traitor — despite Louis’s self-identification as a socialist.