Writers' Monday with Guillaume Musso
It is not a novelist among many others that we had the pleasure to receive this April 8, 2019 in our monthly appointment of the Monday of the Writers. Guillaume Musso has been the most read French author in France for eight consecutive years. An unquestionable and constantly renewed plebiscite, which does not encourage our guest to rest on his laurels. Guillaume Musso ventures more and more resolutely into the land of thrillers, and his new opus “The Secret Life of Writers” is totally in line with this creative dynamic. It is indeed built around the Streisand effect, according to which “the more you try to hide something, the more you attract curiosity about what you want to hide”.
Usually, his novels are set in New York, a city he knows well and where, for him, everything is possible. This time, the pleasure was to create a fictitious island inspired by Porquerolles, Corsica and the Greek islands, in order to escape in spirit to his native Mediterranean.
This book tells the story of a famous author, Nathan Fawles. And if the plot is not autobiographical, it was nevertheless exciting for our guest to make the profession, the vocation of writer, one of the major themes of his novel. Guillaume Musso humorously confided to us that some of Nathan Fawles’ reflections could be his own, notably the idea of taking pleasure in writing and playing with the reader. So there is a lot of “play”, but also of “I” in this novel. His characters may resemble him, or at least possess certain facets of his personality. Accustomed to having recourse to specialists to support the psychology of his characters, he did not feel the need to do so in ” The Secret Life of Writers “, the life of the main protagonist resonating more naturally with his own.
According to his own experience, the writer’s profession never stops, even when he is not writing. Our guest goes even further, explaining that his best inspirations come at the very moment when he should be disconnecting from his work. He confided to us, however, that he never writes at home, because the house is not a place to work and that it is necessary :“To know how to leave this imaginary world to find his family. He realized this when his wife gently pointed out that he spent more time in his “paper world” than in real life, he admits. “It is as difficult to enter this imaginary world as it is to leave it. were the last words of the author who, still impregnated with the writing of his last opus published on April 2, 2019, and under the applause of a conquered public, concluded this 7th Monday of the Writers.
The public was enchanted by this intimate meeting with this great novelist, in this place where many writers have spent so many moments writing stories or poetry in front of a chocolate or a forbidden liquor.