Collapse: A Novel

From “one of the most important, politically vital and morally bracing writers of his generation” (The Guardian), an unflinching account of Édouard Louis’s brother’s life and death.

Édouard’s brother spent much of his life dreaming. He lived in a poor, working-class world, where he imagined that he would become one of the finest butchers in France, that he would travel, that he would make his fortune, that he would restore cathedrals, and that his father, who had disappeared, would return and love him.

But there was no way to escape, no one who could show him how, and everything about him—his drinking, his violence, his behavior with women and with others—condemned him.

At thirty-eight, after years of failure and depression, he was found dead on the floor of his small studio apartment. This book is the story of his collapse.

Édouard Louis traces the life of a man who was in many ways deplorable: violent, misogynistic, homophobic, brutal. But where might understanding begin, and how far can it extend? In Collapse, Louis pursues every angle for answers—newly consulting writers and psychoanalysts and questioning his siblings, his mother, his brother’s partners, and himself. From an outpouring of memory and pain comes a radical gesture of dignity and forgiveness.