A young gay person escapes their small town in search of friendship and love in the big city. A recurring theme as much in real life as in literature.

In his most recent book, Change: Method, Édouard Louis delves deeper into his own journey – as told in The End of Eddy – from his poor upbringing and to the cultural elite in Paris, and the deliberate steps he took along the way to reinvent himself.

In writing the book, Louis was deeply inspired by Alan Hollinghurst’s award winning novel The Line of Beauty. Both books follows a gay protagonist trying to fit in within a different class than the one they were born into.

Alan Hollinghurst is the author novels such as The Line of Beauty, The Stranger’s Child and The Sparsholt Affair.

In this personal lecture, he shares his reading of Change: Method and reflections on shared themes such as class, culture and sexuality.