David Foenkinos almost died at the age of 16. The famous author of Delicacy was victim a rare disease, pleuropericarditis. This infection of the pleura, the membrane that lines the inside of the chest wall and envelops the lungs, was also diagnosed late, which caused him great pain. David Foenkinos started to have pain in his back in 1990, but no doctor found the problem despite numerous examinations. A week later, when his whole body unfortunately started to burn him, the doctors of the Kremlin-Bicêtre, ended up taking it over. Too weak for general anesthesia, David Foenkinos suffered, on January 7, 1991, a real ordeal: numerous pleural pontions under partial anesthesia.
A painful memory
The writer recalls this traumatic experience in the latest issue of Paris Match on newsstands Thursday, December 31, 2020. "Just before the operation, a nurse takes blood from me. I then feel myself going very far, in a long tunnel of blue and yellow light. This famous tunnel so often mentioned. Death opens its arms to me ", he remembered. But David Foenkinos ended up coming back to him: "Detached from my body and strange as it sounds, my fall stops. As if I decide, in spite of myself, that it is not my time. I then see myself taking the opposite path and I find the nurse, panicked who tries to revive me ".
A near-death experience that changed his life. It was indeed at this time, after spending bored days in the hospital, that David Foenkinos began to write. "A click has occurred (…) Little by little, writing invades everything. I train on the job, with failures " , he explained. One day, his work ended up paying off: in 2002 his novel Reversal of idiocy: the influence of two Poles is accepted by Gallimard after dispatch by La Poste. A nice revenge on the disease.
Read also : David Foenkinos: the secrets of the novelist on his ex-wife and his son