It was much easier to tell his clever, cosmopolitan new friends that he was gay than to admit to being working-class. “You can never escape your social class, even if you believe you have,” he says. Defending a working class he feels alienated from and uncomfortable with when he is among them is a juggling act for Eribon. “People emerge from the working class to become artists, engineers, doctors, but the fact that people can do that is the exception, not the rule. A child of the working class generally stays in the working class and does working-class jobs.

Source: The Guardian May 27, 2018 07:30 UTC