The successful novelist Françoise Bourdin, one of the most read in France with more than 15 million books sold, died Sunday at the age of 70, announced this Monday, December 26, to Agence France Presse, the group of Editis publishing.
Unknown to the literary world, Françoise Bourdin is the author of nearly fifty books which have met with immense success. “I extend my most sincere condolences to the family of Françoise Bourdin, to her two daughters, Fabienne and Frédérique, to her grandchildren, I am thinking of all the teams, from Belfond, from Plon and from Pocket, who have worked with her for so many years, as well as to her millions of loyal readers,” said the group’s general manager, Michèle Benbunan. His latest book, “Un si beau horizon”, was released by Plon editions in early 2022.
“A certain contempt for popular literature”
Often described as “popular”, his work, which began in the 1970s, has remained in the shadow of that of Guillaume Musso, for example. “There is a certain contempt for popular literature,” she regretted in 2019 during an interview with AFP. “People who despise what I write have obviously never read a single paragraph. It’s very unfair. It’s an elitist a priori”.
A family of artists
Born in Paris in 1952, Françoise Bourdin comes from a family of artists. His parents, Georges Bourdin and Geori Boué, were famous opera singers, touring abroad. The novelist remembers seeing her mother performing the title role of “Mireille”, Charles Gounod’s opera, at the Arles theater. “When Mireille died in her lover’s arms, I started crying all the tears in my body, surprised to see the public, standing up, applauding wildly,” she liked to say.
“I hardly ever saw my parents,” she said, without bitterness. She retained from that time an intoxicating impression of freedom.
She discovers literature by drawing from her father’s vast library and is passionate about Giono, Colette, Mauriac; then Baudelaire and Nerval, replaced by Proust, Tolstoy, the Brontë sisters, Sartre, Zola, Dumas and Hugo…
She lived not far from Giverny
At the heart of his literary work? The family sagas. The “iron-breaking” teenager also wrote short stories and soon a first novel (“Les soleils humids”) which Julliard published in 1972 when she was not yet of age. A second novel, “De Vagues Herbes Jaunes” appeared the following year and was adapted for television by Josée Dayan.
The death of his father in 1973 upsets the cards. Françoise Bourdin feels the need to intoxicate herself with new sensations. There is this “devouring passion” for horses. In her small study, she kept a photo of herself at full gallop (and without a helmet!) on a track in Maisons-Laffitte. She also owned a Triumph Spitfire – a small English convertible – to satisfy her need “to go fast”.
Up at dawn, the novelist, installed in a large Norman farmhouse in the Seine valley, not far from Giverny, stood immutably in front of her computer every morning to write. “If the inspiration does not come, I will go for a walk in the forest with my dogs”, she said while her two four-legged companions, a Border Collie and a Beauceron, came to beg for a cuddle. More often than not, the inspiration was there.