Édouard Louis: ‘Truth is a revenge because we live in a world of lies’

The author, who became a literary sensation at the age of 21 with The End of Eddy, is appearing in a show exploring acting in theatre and in everyday life

Some people give their bodies to medical science. Edouard Louis has given his to art. That, at any rate, is the view of a fan the novelist met and it seems to hit the mark. Louis is the French literary sensation who was celebrated at 21 for The End of Eddy, an autobiographical account of growing up gay in a working-class village in the north of France. So frank were his descriptions of bullying, repression and deprivation that readers wanted to believe they were fiction. But Louis wrote from first-hand experience.

He was back as the subject of his next novel, History of Violence, in which he described the emotional impact of being raped. Fearless in its evocation of his circular thought processes, obsessive behaviour and dark depression, the book was also an attempt to reclaim a story for himself. For me, writing is always a fight against invisibility," he tells me over Zoom.