Writing About Yourself Isn’t Inherently Selfish

In 2015, the Nobel Prize–winning novelist J. M. Coetzee published a book called The Good Story that he co-authored with a clinical psychologist named Arabella Kurtz. The book is essentially a conversation between Coetzee and Kurtz about the origins and social function of storytelling. It is also a searching, erudite treatise about the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves.

Near the beginning of their exchange, Coetzee expounds on the distinctive way, as he sees it, that writers perceive the story of their life:

To think of a life-story as a compendium of memories which one is free to interpret in the present according to the demands (and desires) of the present seems to me characteristic of a writer’s way of thinking. I would contrast this with the way many people see their life-story: as a history that is forever fixed (‘you can’t change the past’).

Coetzee’s words echoed as I read Édouard Louis’ latest book, Change. Louis emerged on the literary scene in France in 2014 with his debut novel, The End of Eddy. In that book, Louis fictionalizes the story of his bruising childhood in Hallencourt, a working-class town in northern France. As a child, Louis is defined by his difference—he is queer and ambitious in a community whose denizens are locked in a vicious zone of poverty and deprivation. Louis is mocked relentlessly and cast aside by his peers and family members; he resolves to escape as soon as he can.

The End of Eddy was a sensation—it had sold more than 300,000 copies in France by the time it appeared in the United States, in 2017, and was eventually translated into 20 languages. Louis’ next book, History of Violence, describes in heartbreaking detail a rape that its protagonist—another avatar for the writer—endured. Afterward, Louis published Who Killed My Father, a penetrating, nonlinear tale about his relationship with his father, and A Woman’s Battles and Transformations, a similarly structured book about his mother. And now comes Change, which traverses much of the same territory as his prior books.

[Read: When writing about your children is a form of betrayal]

Thus far, Louis has dedicated his literary career to describing, reliving, and reimagining various events in his life. At first, it may seem that he’s circling the same sequence of incidents because he is attempting to engage with memory in the way that, per Coetzee, most people do—so that he can “fix [his] life-story, by repeating over and over … one or other preferred interpretation of it.” But a close reading of Change and Louis’ prior work suggests an alternative objective. Louis is interpreting his memories according to the demands of his present; he is redrafting the story of his life to make sense of where he finds himself in the current moment. In so doing, Louis is teaching his readers how they might benefit from arranging—and possibly even revising—their memories in ways that might help them cope with, and better understand, their contemporary experiences.

In the first of two prologues to Change, Louis explains his relationship with writing and memory:

I’m twenty-six years and a few months old; most people would say that my life is ahead of me, that nothing has started yet, but for a long time now I’ve been living with the feeling that I’ve lived too much; I imagine that’s why the need to write is so deep, to fix the past in writing and, I suppose, to get rid of it, or maybe, conversely, the past is so anchored in me now that I’m forced to talk about it, at every moment, on every occasion, maybe it has won out, and by believing I’m getting rid of it I’m only bolstering its existence and its ascendancy over my life, maybe I’m trapped—I don’t know.

Louis is unsure why he is fixated on his past, so he ventures into his memories to look for answers, and as a result he rehearses many of the narrative beats that are familiar to his ardent readers. He writes about the extreme poverty his family endured, the violence that he experienced and witnessed, the racism that suffused his community, and his frightening personal experiences with homophobia. Then he provides a potted history of his life after he escapes his provincial town, including the various jobs he held (“I’d … worked in a bakery, as a caretaker, a bookseller, a waiter, an usher”). Afterward, he attends elite universities and publishes books about his life. Eventually, he arrives at an impasse. He grows weary of his success and fame; he desires to start “all over again,” and he begins to write Change to remember how he surmounted past challenges.

To this end, Louis includes in Change a sequence of “fictional conversations,” first with his father, and then with his former best friend, Elena. The ostensible purpose of these conversations, which are generally one-sided (for the most part, we’re privy only to Louis’ perspective), is to explain his choices and the trajectory of his life to the people who have shaped him in profound ways. Yet he soon recognizes a pattern of behavior: First, Louis tries desperately to change himself—aesthetically, intellectually, morally, and so on—so that he might achieve his most prized goals. Then, inevitably, he abandons the people he loves most.

Louis’ relationship with Elena is the most resonant example of this trend. He first meets her at his lycée in Amiens—a nearby city where he moved to enroll in a school with a theater program— after another student urges him to goad her with a vulgar comment. Louis obliges but is immediately ashamed; he later apologizes. They soon become inseparable, and Louis begins to model his life on hers. He trains himself to adopt her middle-class speech patterns and accepts her instructions on how he should dress and comport himself. One evening, Louis attends a talk by a visiting professor who, having grown up impoverished, now lives in Paris and is regarded as one of the leading intellectuals in France. Louis subsequently realizes that life in Amiens is no match for his ambition. He decides that he must move to Paris, and slowly extracts himself from his relationship with Elena.

[Read: A redacted past slowly emerges]

The distance afforded by time enables Louis to notice how this sequence of events rhymes with past relationships in which he formed an intense connection with someone, only to discard them at the first sign of a better opportunity. Indeed, Louis has structured Change to surface these connections at the expense of other possible tales that might be teased from his recollections. For Louis, memories are not fixed, whole entities—they are merely the building blocks of the stories we construct about ourselves. Louis also demonstrates how pliable these memories can be: At one point, he explains to his father, “When I realized that my only option was to escape, I looked for every possible way out.” In a footnote at the bottom of the page, however, he offers a concession: “In my first book I explained how I did everything I could not to run away, not to be different. Both stories are true, they simply tell two sides of the same phenomenon, the same life.”

In Louis’ writing, a single memory can yield multiple interpretations, because most important moments in life are accompanied by a range of (often contradictory) feelings. Memories contain multiple truths, each of which is available to be exploited depending on how it might be useful in the present. For Louis, the act of writing Change is an opportunity to bring these truths into conversation, and to choose the version that will enable him to persist.  

Millennials and Gen Zers (Louis himself is a Millennial) are sometimes derided for being self-obsessed. This assessment dovetails with a common criticism of autobiographical fiction, which holds that such work is inherently solipsistic. Louis’ oeuvre, and Change in particular, offers a pointed response by demonstrating the value of writing about one’s personal experiences. By the end of the book, Louis has achieved a deeper understanding of himself, entirely facilitated by his narrative reorganization of his past. In his characteristically inimitable manner, Louis seems to be asking his readers to consider the radical notion that their memories are theirs to use as they please.