I no longer recognized what I was saying. I no longer recognized my own memories when I narrated them; I no longer recognized what I had experienced in the form that had been imposed on my narration. I was losing myself, I knew that if I continued with this narration, it would be too late to go back, what I wanted to say would be lost. I felt that if something was not said at the right moment, it would disappear, without the possibility of return, reality would move away, it would escape, at that moment and forever, I understood that there were certain scenes, certain things that I should not say if I wanted to remember everything, that we can only remember by forgetting, and that if I was forced to remember, then I would forget everything.

The second novel by Édouard Louis, one of the most important young French writers, takes place around an event that happens in the early hours of December 25th. Édouard, who is alone on Christmas day, brings a thirty-year-old man named Reda, of Algerian origin, to his house in Paris. They talk, make love, and sleep for several hours. The next morning, Reda explodes, threatens Édouard with a gun, rapes him, and leaves. The first-person narrator, who tells us the story retrospectively, in an astonishing oral style, is the same as in Louis' first novel, which was extremely successful in Greece as well.