A portrait of the author's mother by the acclaimed writer of the international bestsellers The End of Eddy and History of Violence.Late one night, Édouard Louis got a call from his forty-five-year-old mother: "I did it. I left your father." Suddenly, she was free.This is the searing and sympathetic story of one woman's liberation: of mothers and sons, of history and heartbreak, of politics and power. It reckons with the cruel systems that govern our lives-and with the possibility of escape. Sharp, short, and fine as a needle, it is a necessary addition to the work of Édouard Louis, "one of France's most widely read and internationally successful novelists" (The New York Times Magazine).