Eddy Bellegueule grew up in a small village in northern France in the 1990s.  There was no belle vie for Eddy, no French rural idyll.  Raised in poverty and surrounded by violence and ignorance, his upbringing couldn’t have been further from the France of the popular imagination.  A tough upbringing was made immeasurably harder by the classmates who bullied and tortured him – without mercy or respite – for being gay.

A thinly fictionalized account of his childhood, The End of Eddy was a sensation when it was published in France in 2014, selling more than 300,000 copies and making a literary celebrity of the 21 year-old author who was once Eddy Bellegueule but is now Édouard Louis.  It’s not immediately obvious why.  It’s certainly not the quality of the writing, which – at least in the English translation I read – is workmanlike.  Perhaps what lies at the heart of the book’s extraordinary success is our love for stories of survival and redemption, our delight at seeing beauty flower in the most terrible conditions and against such adversity.  Eddy’s end would have been unbearable if it hadn’t marked the beginning of Édouard.

The recent presidential elections in France have helped to highlight the rise of fascist parties and the disillusionment among the poor and hopeless that feeds them.  The End of Eddy is more than a “misery memoir”; it illuminates places blighted by recession, lives untouched by the prosperity enjoyed elsewhere, and communities entirely marginalized and forgotten.

The picture books I used to read with my children were long ago packed away in boxes and consigned to the attic.  In a home filled with books, some of the best-loved stories – of bears and gorillas, adventures on the moon and in faraway lands – are no longer on view.  Even so, with a little effort, it’s easy to remember them, the books that taught my kids to read, dream, and imagine.

It’s been a long time since I read a picture book, but I recently won an assortment of books in a fundraising raffle that included Peter Sís’s The Wall.  It’s a wonderful book and worthy of the many prizes it received, but by no means is it a book exclusively for kids.  It tells the story of the author’s upbringing behind the Iron Curtain, in post-war Czechoslovakia, and recounts what it was like to live during the Prague Spring before the Soviet tanks rolled in, crushing everything in their path in 1968.  Through a series of intricate drawings, predominantly grey to emphasize the colorlessness of life under a totalitarian regime, Sís conveys brilliantly the constraints, the monotony, and the miserable uniformity, lightened only by occasional glimpses of the symbols of Western freedom: blue jeans, The Beatles, and The Beach Boys.