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A Woman's Battles and Transformations

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One of my favourite authors. This delivered on exactly what I was hoping for, his typical lyrical beautiful writing perfectly translates.

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Édouard Louis's "A Woman's Battles and Transformations" is a moving and insightful portrait of his mother's life, shaped by the forces of class, gender, and violence. Louis writes with a clarity and precision that is both devastating and beautiful, as he recounts his mother's struggles with poverty, abuse, and addiction.

The book is divided into three parts. The first part focuses on Louis's mother's childhood, growing up in a working-class family in northern France. Louis describes the poverty and violence that his mother endured, and the ways in which these experiences shaped her identity.

The second part of the book focuses on Louis's mother's adulthood, and the challenges she faced as a single mother in a patriarchal society. Louis writes about his mother's struggles with addiction, and the ways in which she was often judged and dismissed by others.

The third part of the book focuses on Louis's relationship with his mother, and the ways in which his own understanding of her has changed over time. Louis writes about the guilt and resentment he felt towards his mother as a child, and the ways in which he has come to appreciate and admire her resilience as an adult.

"A Woman's Battles and Transformations" is a powerful and important book. It is a story about one woman's struggles, but it is also a story about the social and economic forces that shape the lives of so many women. Louis's writing is both compassionate and unflinching, and he offers a unique perspective on the ways in which class, gender, and violence intersect.

I highly recommend this book to anyone who is interested in sociology, feminism, or the human experience. It is a book that will stay with you long after you finish reading it.

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Fascinating biography mixed with sociological study. Plus, I just love it when people write about their moms lol.

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I don’t know why for some reason, this memoir reminds me of Portrait of the Mother as a Young Woman by Friedrich Christian Delius. Both are short, only a little more than 100 pages. Both, as happened, are also books about women written by men. While Delius’ book is fictional and portrays the life of a German woman during the era of Nazi Germany, Louis’ book takes a more contemporary approach and describes the life story of his own mother. As the title suggests, Louis’ mother, Monique, battled and transformed.

Louis started his book by describing a photo of his mother when she was young, around 20 years old (which happens to appear on the cover). Her hair was styled differently. It was a selfie before we normalised selfies, taken using an analogue camera that surely doesn’t have a screen. Louis imagines her mother holding the camera backwards to capture her face in the lens. What followed was various battles that his mother had to endure in her marriages, to her first and second husbands, as well as the pain of raising her children. The way Louis describes it indicates intimacy that is regained after years of distance between him and his mother. ‘I cried when I saw this image because I was, despite myself–or perhaps, rather, along with her and sometimes against her–one of the agents of this destruction.’

The transformation begins with a phone call. Through the call, her then forty-five-year-old mother said: ‘I did it. I left your father.’ She was free and embraced things that weren’t possible until then due to the constraint set by the author’s father. Louis’ sentences are short and playful. They directly hit the mark and have poetic qualities to them, which is rendered beautifully in this English translation by Tash Aw (which was actually the main reason I picked up this memoir). Louis draws a comparison between his mother’s life as a woman with his own life as a queer homosexual. They share the feelings of being oppressed by life in the countryside when it was simply unheard of to be different.

As someone living far from my parents now and having to cope with the pain of adjusting to a different life alone in a big city, this memoir is too close to home and perhaps paints the difficulties of parents-children relationships. It’s often been said that we could only understand our parents once we have become parents ourselves (which I don’t know since I’m not a parent yet). But the way Louis describes his life situation makes me realise that our parents behaved in certain ways because they were raised with different values by parents who were raised with different values themselves in different kinds of environments. Each with their own set of problems and sometimes inherited problems from the previous generations themselves.

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What an incredibly moving book! I requested it because of the cover and title to be honest but I was very pleasantly surprised at how much I loved this tiny, but mighty book.

I love to read books and stories about women who leave their husbands. It is no secret that marriage benefits husbands more than wives and the author's mother's marriages were no different. Her life was forever changed after marrying and having children, and I could feel the heaviness that came with all of it as I read the book. Being poor didn't help matters and all I wanted was to get to the part where she finally left. Once she did, she became a different person, which trickled down to her kids.

But the author's mother wasn't the only one who desired liberation. Monsieur Louis also needed his freedom and he found his own way. I was happy for him as well, because feeling stuck and wanting to break free to forge your own path is something I relate to, and so will many other readers.

I definitely recommend this book to my readers.

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This was pretty much the first memoir that I read. I found the way it was written confusing, but this could have just been me being new to this genre book's writing style. I liked that was a short book and that they kept some of the french terms from the original book. This book was mediocre in my opinion. I think. The targeted audience for this book wasn't me.

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A short but powerful and vivid portrait of the author’s mother, a window into the world of French contemporary working-class life, where women are often trapped in oppressive and sometimes violent lives. In this case Monique Belleguele manages to escape after 20 years of a toxic marriage and builds a new life for herself, at last becoming independent. It’s a tender and empathetic portrait, heart-felt, clear-sighted and unflinching, in which Louis explores yet again the familiar territory of his early years, and the life that he too managed to escape.

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The penultimate book by Édouard Louis, young star of French literature and author of the autobiographical books Ending Eddie Belleguel, A History of Violence and Who Killed My Father, deals with the social metamorphosis of his mother, who has long lived a life not her own due to gender and social inequality. A book in which Louis extracts the complexity of working-class existence from its invisibility.

In a short autofiction of just 120 pages, Louis, in his first book ruthless towards his parents, here reconciles with his mother, Monique Belleguele. He recounts everything she has been through: marriages to alcoholics and rapists, having many children, poverty and destitution. But in the end she left her husband, her grown-up bum son, her village on the Somme and moved to Paris to live at her own pleasure. Édouard Louis, himself a "class deserter", admires that she had the courage to change, to finally grab hold of the life she deserved. Having been ashamed of his mother since her youth, Louis now calls her several times a month, dines in posh restaurants and introduces her to Catherine Deneuve. Sudden happiness has given her youth.

Here Louis has succeeded better than in "Who Killed My Father" in portraying parents as strangers separated by a wall of mutual contempt, as real and imperfect individuals with their own failed dreams. Louis continues to see human suffering through the prism of social determinism and makes loud statements about how people are ruined by government policy or capitalism in general, but immediately rebuts his views by telling the story of the mother as a heroine who manages to rise above her circumstances and break free from her stratum.

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In this book, the author explores his mother's life from a critical perspective of his own actions, talking about the violence she experienced throughout her life and how he was a part of that. It is a really interesting and short read about a woman's life, with really good reflections. I enjoyed reading it, and seeing the development of the relationship between Édouard and his mother, and the way he reflects on his own actions.
I wish it was longer, I felt like it could have been developed into a longer book, taking time and space to really reflect in some of the author's ideas, because it felt like a long introduction more than a whole book. It also felt kind of forgettable to me, because it didn't really develop any unique ideas. The writing was pretty good, and I enjoyed the way the author put into words some of his mother struggles.
Overall, it's an interesting read, specially for people that aren't used to reading much non-fiction since it's quite fast paced and it doesn't really use difficult language, but I wouldn't recommend it to everyone.
Huge thank you to NetGalley and Farrar, Strauss and Giroux for the e-arc.
(it's a 3.5 to me)

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Beautifully and thoughtfully written. Edouard Louis is quite popular in the Netherlands, but I’d never read anything by him before and I was really impressed with this. He was reflective and honest about both his mother and his own actions and flaws, and I think he managed to convey a lot about their relationship in just a few pages.

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A Woman’s Battles and Transformations is a short memoir of Édouard Louis’s mother as she frees herself from the oppressive shackles of his father. The writing is vulnerable and heartwarming with an open sense of hindsight on how Édouard had mistreated her in his youth because that was how he saw everyone around him treat her. This was beautiful and I am very intrigued to look into more of Édouard Louis’s work. Thank you to NetGalley and FSG for the e-ARC!

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> Why do I feel as though I’m writing a sad story, when my aim was to tell the story of a liberation?

Édouard Louis has written painfully stark autobiographical work in the past, notably *The End of Eddy*, where he wrote his family, friends, and fellow villagers into an explosive and all-too-common story about how he was expected to submit to traditional expectations: marry a girl, work at the local factory, and be like everybody else; the homosexual Eddy instead showed his family for what they were: racist, nationalistic, and homophobic.

Since then, things have changed. This book shows Louis both digging into his past and the present. He's masterful at showing the scorn and malice that watermarked his parents' relationship.

For example, he tells the story of the time when his mother decided that their family would go on holiday, which would only be possible if she'd register certain documents to get money from the state. Documents that the patriarch of the family held hidden.

> She asked my father for the administrative documents that he had sorted out and filed away the previous year, but he replied that he couldn’t remember where he’d put them. He said it with a faint, cruel smile on his face.
>
> So she waited. She waited for him to go to the café before rummaging through the chest of drawers. She didn’t just open them, she pulled the trays out completely and placed them on the floor, sitting next to them and taking out the piles of paper one after the other; she made phone calls, left messages, called back when she didn’t get a reply, crossed the street again, filled in yet more forms; until the day she told us that it was done, she had won. Her words smothered the noise of the TV: We’re going on vacation next summer. She smiled. (Your face suddenly became so luminous.) My father said that he wouldn’t go with us, that he was better off staying at home, chez lui, but nothing he said mattered to her at this stage: she looked down on him now, thanks to her victory over him.

Louis tells the book from two perspectives, that of his own and that of his mother's. He reaches deeply into what made her tick and how.

> The story of my mother starts with a dream: she was going to be a cook. An extension, most likely, of the reality of life around her: women had always done the cooking and served others. At sixteen she enrolled in the hospitality school in her region, but a year later she had to abandon her training; she was pregnant, about to give birth to my older brother, who would swiftly become alcoholic and violent, always in court or at the police station, either because he’d beaten his wife or set fire to the bus stop or the stands at the village stadium—I’ll come back to that. His father, a plumber whom my mother had met a few months earlier, asked her to keep the child. They married out of convenience and moved in together. He went to work, and at eighteen she was already a “stay-at-home mom,” as she put it. Perhaps, a bit later, she might have been able to pick up where she’d left off and pursue all her youthful dreams anew, but barely two years after the birth of her first child, the doctors told her she was pregnant again, and she brought a second child into the world: my older sister. At twenty, she found herself with two kids, no degree, and a husband she already hated after just a few years with him. He would come home drunk in the middle of the night. She wouldn’t know where he had spent the evening, and they’d argue. When she spoke to me about this more than twenty years later, she explained: I was stronger than him, I wasn’t going to be pushed around. But it wasn’t much of a life. I was tired—tired of living in a situation where I always had to be on my guard, ready to defend myself all the time.

There is a lot of evidence of what made Louis's parents marriage a hateful and vindictive one, even though ther's naturally ups and downs as in nearly all relationships.

> Since her life was stripped of all interest, nothing could happen unless it involved my father. She no longer had a story of her own; her story could only be, ultimately, his story. One morning, the factory called to tell us that a heavy weight had fallen and crushed my father’s back while he was working. The doctors warned my mother that he would be paralyzed for several years. He would no longer receive a salary, only some benefits paid by the state as compensation. Both he and my mother went immediately from being poor to being destitute, and in order to earn some money she had to work as a home health aide, washing elderly people in the village, a job that exhausted her and that she hated.

One of Louis's greater strengths as a writer lies in how he describes the mundane to reveal the harrowing.

> When I announced to her that I was gay, she replied anxiously, Well, I just hope you’re not the woman when you’re in bed! It’s an anecdote that makes me laugh nowadays.

There's both fantastically written rhythm and love in this book. Even though Louis rarely explains reasons for his actions, they're evident; he treats the reader as intelligent and thereby reaches conclusions and actions that can be left unsaid; in here lies the rub, something that may frustrate readers who look for conclusions. When does life contain conclusions?

Unlike *The End of Eddy*, this book is different, due to a different age, where people naturally change, even in the most static of environs. There's a lot of darkness in here, while there is a lot of breathing space as well. Even though some potential readers would discard Louis's books for fear of the darkness, he's got a tight rein of what makes us work, simply by being able to succinctly put his finger on what makes us *not* work. This book is a commendable piece of work.

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Thanks to Netgalley and FSG for the ebook. In this brief book, the author gives a glimpse into his early life in order to tell us about his mother. This book tells about her brief, early marriage that left her with two young kids and a drunken and violent husband by the time she was eighteen. She leaves that husband and then quickly repeats the pattern. The author is able to stay with his education and is able to leave his humble beginnings, unlike his siblings. And then one day, his mother calls and says she has finally left his father. Amazing, at age forty-five, his mother is finally live a normal life that she controls.

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I loved the only other book by Édouard Louis that I've read (The End of Eddy), so was very excited to have my request approved for his latest book.

Like The End of Eddy, this book draws on the author's own life, this time focusing on his mother and his relationship with her (he has another book, Who Killed My Father, which I'm now super keen to check out!). It's a touching portrayal of a man looking back as an adult on his mother and her experiences and re-framing his views of her. The book is written in very short, snappy chapters, and as a result I found it really hard to put down.

Recommended!

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In his previous autobiographical novels, especially <i>End of Eddy</i> and <i>Who Killed My Father</i>, Édouard Louis subjected himself to a clear-eyed examination of his working class origins, the experience of growing up gay in public housing, and the social effects of alcoholism and toxic masculinity. In this most recent novella, he revisits these same concerns about class and sexuality but he centers the focus specifically on his relationship with his mother. While the title might be <i>A Woman's Battles and Transformations</i>, he says that it could equally be called "A Son's Struggles Not to Become a Son". It is at times an unforgiving assessment of his mother, a twice-married woman with no education, not even a driver's license, who helplessly becomes the serial victim of domestic abuse. As a teenager he comes to despise her lower-class grammar; when she visits his lycée, he warns her not to pick her nose; he hates her for her subservience. Only when she leaves his father can he celebrate her. Reworking Simone de Beauvoir's famous aphorism ("one is not born a woman, one becomes a woman"), he argues that his mother only became a woman when liberated from her motherhood.

"Show, don't tell" is the reigning rule of contemporary literature. But Édouard Louis' novel remonstrates against this simplistic dictum. His mission is to explain reality rather than just represent it. And so Louis subjects all of life to social critique. During a summer vacation, when he returns from university, he develops appendicitis but his mother refuses to believe he is sick and does not call an ambulance. In her eyes, doctors and hospitals are for the middle-class with money, who spend their free time whining about trivial pains to feel self-important. In his father's eyes, medicine is for women. Louis sees in his parents a lesson about social mobility and class resentment. In his analysis, his mother can only see him as an instrument of class aggression, rather than as a son in need of medical attention.

Édouard Louis' novels are not just sombre memoirs of industrial poverty and lower-class misfortune. His novels advocate for a different way of doing literature, combining narrative and manifesto, plot and polemic, confession and critique. He rejects the idea that literature should not express raw emotions or should hide his political arguments. His memoirs are anti-literary. Writing about his mothers means "to write against literature."

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Oh, Edouard Louis has yet to disappoint. This is yet another heart-felt, wrenching story about family, class, abuse. This time, his focus is the story of his mother, and which probably has the happiest ending of all his efforts combined. Like Ernaux, or Duras, Louis tackles the same subject over and over again, something he acknowledges in the text, but each time he occupies a new lens, one that allows him to render the emotions anew, and always with laser focus. I could read him forever.

Thanks to the publisher for the e-galley.

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