Young Leo Lauzon is torn between two worlds – the squalid Montreal tenement that he inhabits with his severely dysfunctional (and largely insane) family, and the imaginative world that he constructs for himself through his writings, where he’s Leolo Lozone, son of a Sicilian peasant (conceived in a bizarre act involving a tomato). And his experiences of growing up (especially his sexual development) affect his response to both these worlds…

Leo Lozeau is a French-Canadian pre-teen living with his family in a working class inner city neighborhood of Montréal. In Leo’s mind, his family is not just eccentric – they’re crazy. His sister Rita is indeed institutionalized. A turkey and a rat live in the family bathtub (the turkey invited, the rat not). His parents are obsessed with everyone in the family having regular bowel movements, even to the point of feeding them laxatives. His slightly dim older brother Fernand is obsessed with weight-lifting, all stemming from being beaten up by a local bully when he was younger. And his grandfather, Albert, once tried to drown him. But Leo doesn’t see himself as being crazy like the rest. Beyond thinking about girls – most specifically their neighbor Bianca, who preoccupies her time in her own unusual way – Leo does whatever he can to make sense of his life. These activities include reading the book “L’avalée des avalés” by Réjean Ducharme and believing that he was conceived by errant sperm on a tomato shipped from Italy, hence why he wants to be known as Léolo Lozone.