Fear is something the people I grew up with feel every single day. What was wonderful for me was that the dominant class panicked, they had a real sense of fear. People realised they could revolt and the politicians were reminded of that too. These gilets jaunes finally made us feel something had changed, politics had changed. You hear politicians on the radio and television and you think, what in the world are they talking about? Here we saw the reality. The gilets jaunes movement made reality smash right into politics. I was bowled over when the movement started and suddenly I saw these bodies we see very little in public spaces and that I try to make visible in my books.

You have written that you supported the gilets jaunes movement because the photos you saw of their bodies, “ravaged by work, fatigue, hunger and the permanent humiliation of the dominated by the dominant”, resembled those of your father, brother, aunt… Today, in my daily existence, I don’t concern myself at all with what my parents think of me. He was in the north of France voting for the National Front and I was in Paris, studying philosophy and living my gay life as a militant left-winger. We didn’t argue, it was just our lives became too different. After I Ieft home, I didn’t speak to my father. When I was growing up, my father was ashamed of me and said I was bringing shame on my family, but he was also capable of defending me. Is this book trying to get that attention? You describe a concert you organised at home as a child to entertain your parents and friends and how desperate you were to have your father’s attention. I’m not denying what I wrote in The End of Eddy, but I’d written about the violence he made others suffer, not the violence he himself suffered. When he opened the door and I saw his body was destroyed by poverty and the suffering he had endured, it helped me see another angle: I was capable of seeing him as a whole. I hadn’t seen or spoken to him for about five years. After History of Violence came out, he called me and I went to see him. He was a violent person and I have many, very clear, memories of his violence. In The End of Eddy, I showed the complexity of my father. In your first novel, The End of Eddy, you were hard on your father this is a much kinder portrait. And I will fight for them, whether they love me or not. When I write about politics and ask questions, I don’t ask if I love the person I’m writing about or if they love me. But it’s not the point – the violence is the point. I have to admit I don’t know if I love my father or not. Some French editors have defined the book as a love letter to your father. Politicians like Jacques Chirac, Nicolas Sarkozy, Macron… they took political decisions whose impact was as personal and intimate for my father as his first kiss or the first time he made love. The administration contacted my father, whose back had been destroyed, and said: “You have to go back to work”, so he did, as a road sweeper, which destroyed his body even more. When I was very young, perhaps eight, nine, they changed the benefits system in France and started asking people to return to work, whatever the state of their bodies. So th e book is more political than personal? I have tried to restore the truth of this through my father’s story. Politicians like Theresa May and Emmanuel Macron deny this reality. Working-class women are more likely to suffer violence blacks and Arabs are more likely to die. We know if you are a factory worker in France you have a 50% higher chance of dying before 55 compared with executives. Who Killed My Father is the truth about politics and politicians a question, literally, of life and death. This book transmits my anger against that violence. I believe so, in that it describes how the bodies of working-class people are destroyed by the system. When we spoke two years ago, you said this book would be a tragedy.

Edy edouard