INTERVIEW
When talking about personal development, the name of Laurent Gounelle comes back almost immediately. His books The Man who wanted to be happy (2008), The gods always travel incognito (2010) and The philosopher who was not wise (2012) sold 200,000 copies in total. While he has just released a new book, L'art makes you feel good , co-authored with Camille Told, the writer looks back on his unexpected success.
Heard on europe1:
I had missed everything, but my family, my parents and my friends still loved me
"Full of fear, doubts, psychological problems (...), I was a perfect loser and I had failed everything I had undertaken so far," says Laurent Gounelle Anne Roumanoff, about his past life . Depressed and at the bottom of the hole, it was at this moment, in the mid-2000s, that he realized that one could be happy, simply.
"I had missed everything, but my family, my parents and my friends still loved me," the writer recalls. A kind of enlightenment was then imposed on him: "I understood that I did not need to succeed something to be a good person."
Today, it is to him that people who read his books come to confide in search of advice to be happy. "Signing sessions last a very long time because everyone wants to tell me his life," says Laurent Gounelle at the microphone of Europe 1. "I enjoy listening to the story of each and the testimonies, even if I'm not no psychologist, "recalls the person concerned.