Excerpt from The End of Eddy by Edouard Louis, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

An Encounter

From my childhood I have no happy memories. I don't mean to say that I never, in all those years, felt any happiness or joy. But suffering is all-consuming: it somehow gets rid of anything that doesn't fit into its system.

Two boys appeared in the hallway, the first tall with red hair, and the second short with a hunchback. The tall redhead spat in my face How do you like that, punk.

The gob of spit dripped slowly down my cheek, thick and yellow, like the noisy mucus that obstructs the throats of old people or people who are ill, with a strong, sickening smell to it. Shrill, strident laughter from the two boys Look, right in his face, the little pussy. It is dripping from my eye right toward my lips, ready to enter my mouth. I don't dare wipe it off. I could; I'd only have to lift my sleeve. It wouldn't even take a second, a tiny movement, to prevent the spit from coming into contact with my lips, but I do nothing for fear of offending them, for fear of making them more agitated than they already are.

* * *

I didn't really think they'd do it. Which is not to say that violence was something new to me, far from it. As far back as I can remember I can see my drunk father fighting with other drunk men leaving the café, breaking noses and teeth. Or, some man having looked too directly at my mother and my father, under the influence, erupting Who the fuck do you think you are, asshole, looking at my wife like that. My mother trying to calm him down Calm down, sweetheart, calm down to no avail. My father's buddies, who would in the end intervene—that's the rule, what friends do, what it means to be a real buddy—jumping in to separate my father and the other fellow, the victim of my father's inebriation whose face was now all beaten up. I would see my father, after one of our cats had a litter, take the newborn kittens and slip them into a plastic grocery bag and swing it against some cement edge until the bag was filled with blood and the meowing had ceased. I had seen him butcher pigs in the yard, and drink the still-warm blood that he was collecting in order to make blood sausage (blood on his lips, his chin, his T-shirt) It's the best, the blood you get from an animal right when it dies. The squeals of the dying pig as my father sliced its trachea could be heard throughout the village.

* * *

I was ten years old. I was new at the school. When they appeared in the hallway I didn't know them. I didn't even know their first names, which was unusual in a small school like this one, barely two hundred students and where everyone got to know one another right away. They approached slowly, smiles on their faces, nothing aggressive about them, so that at first I thought they were just coming up to introduce themselves. But why would these older kids be coming to speak to a newbie like me? The schoolyard obeyed the same rules as the rest of the world: the big guys kept away from the little ones. My mother would say much the same thing when speaking about workers Us little folks are nobodies, especially to the fat cats.

* * *

There in the hallway they asked me who I was, if I was Bellegueule, the one everyone was talking about. They asked me the question that I would repeat to myself endlessly for months, for years,

You're the faggot, right?

By saying it they inscribed it on me permanently like stigmata, those marks that the Greeks would carve with a red-hot iron or a knife into the bodies of deviant individuals, people who posed a threat to their community. Impossible to rid myself of this. I was shocked, even though it was hardly the first time someone had said something like this to me. You never get used to insults.

* * *

A feeling of powerlessness, a loss of balance. I smiled—and the word faggot that was echoing, exploding in my head, went on pulsing within me, matching the frequency of my heartbeat.

Excerpted from The End of Eddy by Eddy Bellegueule. Copyright © 2017 by Eddy Bellegueule. Excerpted by permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.