PARIS: Novelist Françoise Bourdin, who died Sunday at the age of 70, was never invited to filming sets, and rarely quoted in the literary pages of newspapers, yet he is one of France’s ten best-selling authors.

“There is a certain contempt for popular literature”, lamented AFP in 2019 the novelist with more than 15 million books sold, translated into 12 languages.

In nearly 50 novels, Françoise Bourdin has “conquered a wide readership, with her family stories, drama and hilarity, her clear and sculpted writing”, underlines Editis boss, Michele Benbunan. All were almost certain to become best-sellers, some adapted for television, such as “Terre Indigo”.

“The (Editis) group team keeps memories of an imaginative writer, meticulous in writing and close to her readers, of a passionate and independent woman, who loves to talk about her love of speed, horses and cars”.

The novelist with the slightly cobbled voice of an unrepentant smoker has chosen to live far from Paris, and admits to writing “stories similar to ours”, centered on family tales.

“The people who hate what I write have clearly never read a paragraph. This is so unfair. It is elitist a priori,” he defended himself to AFP.

But “I do not disappoint my readers”. “Those who take pains to read me find a certain pleasure in it”.

“At one point, we told ourselves that my readership, mostly women and over 50, would collapse.” “In reality, it didn’t happen that way. My readership grew with girls finding one of my books at their mother’s house and buying a few in turn. It continued and it was amazing…” , Françoise Bourdin explains.

Need “fast”

Born in Paris in 1952, Françoise Bourdin comes from a family of artists. His parents, Georges Bourdin and Geori Boué, were well-known opera singers, touring overseas.

The novelist remembers seeing his mother perform the title role of “Mireille”, Charles Gounod’s opera, at the Arles theatre. “When Mireille died in the arms of her lover, I started crying with all the tears in my body, shocked to see the public standing up, clapping wildly,” she likes to say.

“I hardly saw my parents,” he said, without bitterness. From then on, he maintained an intoxicating impression of freedom.

He discovered literature by drawing from his father’s extensive library and was fond of Giono, Colette, Mauriac; then Baudelaire and Nerval, replaced by Proust, Tolstoy, the Brontë brothers, Sartre, Zola, Dumas and Hugo…

The teenage “iron breaker” also wrote short stories and soon the first novel (“Les soleils humids”) which Julliard published in 1972 when he was not of age.

A second novel, “De Vagues Herbes Jaunes” appeared the following year and was adapted for television by Josée Dayan.

His father’s death in 1973 messed up the cards. Françoise Bourdin felt the need to intoxicate himself with new sensations. There is an “appetite of devouring” for horses. In his little den, he keeps a picture of himself at full speed (and helmetless!) on the track at Maisons-Laffitte. He also owns a Triumph Spitfire – a small English convertible – to fulfill his need to “go fast”.

His passion for writing would be reborn after the birth of his daughters, Fabienne and Frédérique.

Since 1994, the date of her first collaboration with Belfond, she has published thirty-six novels. Her last novel “Un si beau horizon” was published in early 2022 by Plon editions where she has followed her editor for more than 10 years, Céline Thoulouze.