Interview by Claudia Steinberg
Portrait by Dominique Nabokov

CS You have been criticised for supposedly maligning the working class in which you grew up and where, as a gay boy, you suffered. When you succeeded in blending into the upper class, you became critical of that class, too. Was that painful? You had, after all, invested enormous energy into your transformation.

EL When you need to escape, you always think that on the other side there will be complete relief and that everything will be simple, but in fact, that’s never the case. When I was a child, I thought, one day I will escape my childhood, and I will escape poverty, and I will escape my family, and all my problems will vanish. When I finally arrived in those more dominant classes, I didn’t feel at ease. I felt a lot of shame, and I hated the way it reproduced the violence of the world we live in. I also saw a great deal of homophobia. You realise the cost of change: I changed my language, my accent, my name, my way of talking. I changed my way of handling a fork because people in the bourgeoisie were making fun of my handling the fork like a peasant. When I finished the first draft of Change I showed it to some friends, and some even very clever people told me, “You can’t say you’re melancholy. You work with Laurie Anderson, and you have a book on Kindle.”

CS You have talked about instrumentalising the power of emotions for the revolution.

EL Emotions reflect our world and its social structures. The sadness of someone who changed class, the sadness of my mother having been trapped with a man who, for 20 years, told her to stay home, to cook, to raise the kids, not to work, not to put on makeup: how my father treated my mother was political, and so was her sadness. When I started writing, I felt the rejection of my outspoken emotions from the literary world. Many books, of course, are deeply moving, but generally emotions are only legitimate if you don’t impose them on others. People say things like, “Oh, this book is so good because it’s without pathos.” But why? I don’t mean that everyone should do pathos, of course – Bertolt Brecht thought that emotions would cloud the mind – but I believe that emotions are rejected, not least because they are associated with women, and they’re also associated with the working class and therefore inferior, like telenovelas.

CS Restraint and refinement of feelings show that you’re superior because you’re not a victim of your feelings – but it takes a rigorous education to learn that.

EL I see something revolutionary in injecting as many emotions as possible into art and into literature in order to weaponise them, and to force people to watch a reality they don’t want to look at. It is taking away the freedom of the reader to protect themselves from the intensity of feelings. Euripides was criticised for having children die in his plays, but I love Euripides’ idea that you can force people to look at violence and its relationship to the human condition.

CS Isn’t Greek theatre generally tied to the idea of catharsis?

EL Yes, but Euripides pushed it very hard. All the Greek tragedies are full of emotion, and that’s why I’m obsessed with them. I’ve been translating plays by Anne Carson, like her version of Antigone, into French, because of the intense, often conflicting emotions. To me, the question is, how can we not just forget the message by way of cleaning our hands? There is a letter from Jean-Jacques Rousseau where he responds to a political debate over the financing of a theatre in Switzerland, in which he argues that people are only moved for the duration of the play. How can we use emotions as weapons, like Euripides or Sophocles, to lead to political transformation?

CS Considering your father’s mindset and frustration with your lack of masculinity, one would not expect much tenderness. However, one could hope that some sweetness might have come from your mother – or was she also too worn out by her tough life?

EL Throughout my childhood, she reproduced the violence from my father. They were chained together by violence. When I was a child, she was an extremely dark person. “Why do you talk like a girl? Why can’t you be normal?” She was so tough, and I hated her. But when she broke free from my father after 20 years, she took all his stuff, put everything into a bin bag, and threw it out the window. You can become a conduit for violence like an electric current runs through bodies. When my mother cut off that current, I saw her becoming much more open, much more funny, much more generous. I stopped believing in individuals and starting believing in situations.

CS You call her a survivor, while your father and your alcoholic brother were the ones who went under or collapsed. The mistreated ones are the survivors; they have acquired the skill of endurance.

EL I’ve been exploring what is called the “paradox of domination,” where domination becomes a key for emancipation. My extremely violent brother, who beat women, me, and other gay people, died three years ago at the age of 30. My father is only 60, but he can’t walk, and he can’t breathe. My father and my brothers were trapped by their power. I have been trying to explore this in my recent performance with Laurie Anderson here in New York, how domination and violence are an extremely complex mechanism: what gives you power might destroy you, and what is intended to destroy you can empower you. We should see violence and domination not as something static but as a river, something in constant flux.

CS Change seemed very courageous to me because you don’t paint a very charming picture of yourself, but reveal your merciless ambition to leave your destructive milieu behind, which required using people as stepping stones. You confessed to having hurt people, and I wanted to hear about that.

EL It’s only fair, because when I write about my father or my mother or my brother, I turn them into sociological characters. I have to treat myself as a character too: I try to analyse who I was as a teenager or as a young adult with the same distance that I would expose my father to. When I wrote Change, I wanted to talk about the violence that I subjected people to. .