Alexis Patri 2:00 p.m., February 26, 2022

At the microphone of Isabelle Morizet in the program "There is not just one life in life" on Saturday, the writer David Foenkinos looks back on his personal and professional journey.

And in particular on his relationship to his career in literature, a reality that he had never considered possible when he began to write.

INTERVIEW

In 18 novels published since 2002, David Foenkinos has collected 15 scholarships and literary prizes, and received two César nominations for the film adaptation of his bestseller 

La Délicatesse

.

However, the recognized writer took a long time to have writing as a profession, and even as an activity that could allow him to earn money.

He explains it on Saturday on Europe 1 at the microphone of Isabelle Morizet, on the occasion of his invitation to the 

program There is not just one life in life

. 

>> Find Isabelle Morizet's shows every weekend from 1 p.m. to 2 p.m. on Europe 1 as well as in podcast and replay here

Because, despite a rain of literary prizes, David Foenkinos sold very few books during the first ten years of his career.

“I lived to be 35 with very little, very little money,” explains the novelist.

"But I had very few necessities. It seemed incredible to me that people could live on what they loved. And I was very pragmatic: if I didn't earn money from books, it wasn't serious."

“I was even ready to redo a waiter or a guitar teacher”

In 2033, at the beginning of the lean years, the writer won with

Entre les oreille

the Bourse du Talent Écrivain from the Jean-Luc Lagardère Foundation.

"It's a scholarship that was 25,000 euros. It was huge and it allowed me to live for two years," says David Foenkinos.

"So I still had help too."

>> READ ALSO - 

David Foenkinos says he believed in "a joke" when his first novel was chosen by Gallimard

The purse exhausted, the novelist does not find himself on the straw.

He who never saw writing as a career continued with odd jobs.

"I was a journalist for the women's magazine

Muteen

, for

Psychologies Magazine

, I gave lessons, I worked on scenarios", he lists at the microphone of Europe 1. "I was even ready to be a server or a guitar teacher again. I know that I would have managed no matter what."

"During all these years, I never said to myself 'Hey, I'm going to make a living with literature'. It's not that it doesn't exist, but it exists so rarely," he recalls.

"And, at that time, I couldn't imagine that I was going to hit the mainstream in that decade."

>> READ ALSO - 

David Foenkinos: "When I write, I like to be uprooted by what I can see"

It was ultimately La Délicesse, an eighth novel released in 2009, that would make David Foenkinos one of the major figures in current French literature.

First printed in 3,000 copies, it will finally be bought by 1.5 million readers.

Yet his regular readers saw no change in the writer's work that could account for this sudden shift from obscurity to success.

"Me neither," says the writer.

But, with the hindsight of the years, David Foenkinos thinks he has understood what, in this book, made the difference.

“Perhaps the book is, at first, more serious than the previous ones, while keeping my spirit of fantasy”, he advances, without being entirely certain.

"Maybe it was the mix of the two that played."

Two years after its publication, the book was adapted for the cinema and the story embodied on screen by Audrey Tautou and François Damien attracted a new audience to this novel.