This Monday, I had the incredible fortune to attend a meeting with Frédéric Beigbeder at YBK.
I still can’t quite recover from the experience. There you are, sinking into a beanbag, and in front of you sits a living legend. Sipping Red Bull with vodka from a plastic cup, he jokes, shares his thoughts and fears, patiently answering (sometimes foolish) questions. Just a regular person, as alive and flawed as the rest of us.
To be honest, I didn’t like a lot about him. Beigbeder is deathly afraid of dying. He does everything in his power to postpone the inevitable—hiding out on an island to escape Parisian smog, surviving on food and vitamins carefully curated by geneticists and nutritionists. Yet, he drinks heavily and, well, all those stories about drugs? They’re true. He’s a committed fatalist, 100% convinced that the end of the world is near. And he adores women.
He despises men. Some, like certain writers, especially so.
When asked about the work of his fellow writer, Bernard Werber, he shot back, “You consider him a writer?”
Maybe it’s all an act, maybe the real Frédéric is mild-mannered and meek, wearing striped pajamas and sipping warm milk. Perhaps he secretly loves people and waters a ficus on his terrace. But something tells me that much of what he said that evening was the raw, unfiltered truth.
But none of this diminishes the fact that Frédéric Beigbeder is one of the greatest writers of our time.
Which makes the trophy I took home that night all the more precious: an empty notebook, personally signed by Beigbeder himself, with a message wishing a young author success. Now, my first novel simply has to be born within its pages! And I’m certain it will be.
