The philosopher and novelist dispenses each week at the MK2 Odeon, in Paris, the Mondays philosophy and signs the podcast “a practical philosophy”, on Spotify. It was during a trip to Chile, in the summer of 1994, that he kissed his true vocation.
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“I was 21 years old when I went on a trip to Chile with Guillaume Allary. We were going to join my friend Charles Guérin-Surville, who had fled to Paraguay following a family drama and crisscrossed America South. We were there to take care of him. In this photo, we just came to find him.
This summer 1994, so many things happened for the three of us … We have since been friends. It was at this precise moment that I decided to change lanes and become a writer. I had just finished Sciences Po and succeeded in the HEC competition, but I wanted to do philosophy and write novels. I am on the left in the photo, on the right it is Charles and in the middle Guillaume, then in management university in Dauphine and who, like me, wanted to branch off to register in philosophy and prepare the aggregation.
It was an essential summer for my vocation, the one where I decided to no longer obey what my social background imposed on me, to listen to my true desire. That day, Guillaume gave me a reading return on what was going to become my first published novel. I was very moved: I had given him my 300 pages printed before leaving and would never have imagined that he would take this pavement with him. In the morning, in the room of our guest house, so I was surprised to see him get out of his backpack my text, fully annotated.
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A few hours later, while we were barbotic in hot water sources that felt the sulfur very hard, at the top of a volcano, Guillaume made a severe return on my work that hurt me a lot. He told me that I had to dig further a truth to get in the depths of my intimacy and that I had to think more of the reader when I wrote. These are always the two remarks he makes me when I give him a text. His criticisms of that summer announced those that I would receive throughout my life.
It was not a first: teenager, it was to him that I read my poems and my first novel. He has always made a very fine look at the work of his relatives. He already owned an editor’s soul, a mixture of benevolence and critical severity. During this founding summer, Guillaume therefore also took his first steps in the profession, without knowing that he would become a publisher [Guillaume Allary is the founder and CEO of Allary editions, who also publish the Arab of the future, of Riad Sattouf ]. As for me, living my writing still seemed to me an inaccessible dream …
Finally, this book, which I had titled “the time of departure”, will be published in 1999 at Flammarion under the name downhill. On this occasion, I asked that Guillaume be the publisher of my work. Since then, we have released ten pounds together and he has not changed, he does not take a thousand tweezers when he gives his opinion. He is always my publisher and we keep this same report. To dive back into this image is to see the gaze of publisher of Guillaume, calm but who judges, and mine, sure of himself but who takes slaps. She also reminds me of a forty -year -old friendship that allowed us to help each other to change our ways. “