The Belgian screenwriter and Lukas Dhont collaborator opens up about his deeply personal book The Edges, and why “it’s hard to write about fire when you’re burning”
In The Edges, Angelo Tijssens tells a story of a man going home after the death of his abusive mum in clipped, impressionistic strokes. Withholding as much as it reveals, it’s a haunting first novel in which “we don’t know anyone’s names, but we do know what they smell like”, says the writer from his studio in Antwerp. “We have enough books already about trying to understand. And speaking from experience, it doesn’t fucking matter. It doesn’t matter if you can explain it, it doesn’t make it any better, because you have to literally cope with the facts and those facts are subjective.”
Like the narrator in his story, Tijssens grew up on the Belgian coast and endured the kind of childhood it takes a lifetime to grow past. Moving to Antwerp at the age of 18, he studied theatre at the city’s Conservatorium before joining the Ontroerend Goed, an immersive theatre troupe. He took to writing and acting for the screen in his mid-20s, partnering with Ghent-born director Lukas Dhont on two films that dwelt in the innermost corners of the teenage psyche, Girl (2018) and Close (2022). The latter was shortlisted for an Oscar; the former won a Camera d’Or at Cannes and a whole host of controversy to boot – more on which, later.
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Finally, at 36, Tijssens felt ready to tell a story that closely mirrored his own – though the edges would be left purposely smudgy. The plot sees a young gay man revisit his hometown to sort through the scant few possessions left by his mum, an alcoholic who abused him terribly. While there, he looks up an old flame on Facebook, not so much looking for love as clinging to its very possibility, like Leo DiCaprio clutching at the flotsam in Titanic before sinking beneath the waves. “I always say it’s hard to write about fire when you’re burning,” says Tijssens of the book. “I couldn’t have written this story when I was 21, but now it’s become stuff that is there [for me to use]. And that is of course deeply traumatic, but it’s mine. I can own it – like an object in space, I can look at it from different angles and think, that’s not interesting or that’s interesting. I can use it as a tool to generate fiction.”
The novel, translated into English by Michele Hutchison, was first published in Belgium in 2022. Originally envisioning the story as a screenplay, Tijssens soon changed tack when he realised the form was a better fit for its interiority. “Cinema is really about acting in a literal sense – about movement, about people doing stuff or things changing,” says Tijssens. “In literature, you can think, you can doubt. You can travel through time in one sentence.” Compressing whole oceans of feeling into its 94 pages, the story flits between first-person narration for the here-and-now and second-person for the flashback scenes (“You taste blood and you smell wet plaster”), a neat delineation that breaks down gradually over the course of the book. It’s a striking conceit that shines a revealing light on the ways in which trauma sits undigested in the body.
“When it comes to trauma, it’s easy to think that’s someone else,” says Tijssens, who sees the story in optimistic terms, as one painful step in the narrator’s inching towards self-acceptance. “That it’s something that happened in the past. And it’s not because you’re not always reliving it or constantly thinking about it that you’ve changed. But that person or, in this particular case, that kid is still there. So I wanted the narrator to address both the scared little kid and the reader, forcing empathy by using that second person.”
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Forcing that connection is a thread that extends across all of Tijssen’s work; he’s talked in the past of its “militant softness”, which feels apt. For Girl, his first collaboration with Dhont, he consulted with Belgian dancer Nora Monsecour in telling a version of her story, where the fiercely corporeal world of ballet collides with a young transgender woman suffering from acute body dysmorphia. Unusually, the film won acclaim at Cannes before attracting a maelstrom of criticism online. The reasons were complex, but much of it focused on the casting of a cis-male actor in the leading role, and a wrenching moment of self-harm that saw the film branded “the most dangerous movie about a trans character in years” by The Hollywood Reporter. Monsecour rushed to defend the story, but the film had already been found guilty by consensus.
“It wasn’t pleasant,” says Tijssens, looking back on the controversy. “We were in a position where you just don’t start to argue. You listen, and I think we listened a lot and we learned a lot. It was hard at times, but also beautiful. I mean, I had the most beautiful conversations with people, and I still do almost ten years [after we wrote it]. We probably would do stuff differently [if we were making it now], though I tend not to try and make that thought exercise.”
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The experience left him nervous about working with Dhont again on Close, “especially because we decided to write a film about those topics – we kind of stole Andrew Tate’s topics and turned them around.” Intensely personal for both Dhont and Tijssens, the film tells the story of two teenage boys whose intimate bond is severed when schoolmates call it into question, with tragic results. “We wanted to talk about fragility and masculinity and we didn’t want to talk about queer characters,” says Tijssens. “We wanted to talk about intimacy between boys, which is [often] frowned upon or ridiculed. So again, it was pretty, um, tantalising to do.”
This year Tijssens has three more film projects in the works, including a third collaboration with Dhont (Coward), something the writer describes as a period piece set in Belgium. He’s also in the midst of writing his third book – a second, The End of the Street, was published at home in 2024 – leading me to wonder what his professional calling even is these days. “I’m trying to use the word ‘storyteller’ without throwing up in my mouth a little,” he says, laughing, “because it sounds like I’m trying to sell someone clay sculptures of my ancestors or something ... It feels like good architecture, you know? Where you only build something when you know what elements the structure has to protect you from. Bad architects just build shit, and then see what they’re gonna put inside.”
The Edges by Angelo Tijssens is published by Daunt Books, and is out now.