Retour à Reims

"'There was a question that had come to trouble me a bit earlier, once I had taken the first steps on this return journey to Reims... Why, when I have had such an intense experience of forms of shame related to class, shame in relation to the milieu in which I grew up, why, when once I had arrived in Paris and started meeting people from such different class backgrounds, I would often find myself lying about my class origins... why had it never occurred to me to take up this problem in a book?' Returning to Reims is a breath-taking memoir of return, a family story of class, sexuality, gender and of the shifting political allegiances of the French working classes."