Ginger beer or ginger ale? One is a ginger ale, the other a lemonade flavored with the same root, as the waiter explains, quicker to enlighten us on the menu than the internet connection. Both drinks are alcohol-free, a substance Eva Bester gave up eight years ago: “I had too great a taste for drunkenness”, says the journalist, who simply evokes her “excess” past. “I don’t do it to show off, but because every time I spoke about it publicly I realized that it had helped people. » And when we were for seven years the producer and host, on France Inter, of a program called “Remedy to melancholy”, which transferred, at the start of the 2021 school year, to “L’Embellie”, we can only be sensitive to this idea of helping others, of improving their lives a little – so misanthropic do we seek, as a good reader of Cioran, to appear.
That posed, goes, therefore, for a first round of ginger beers accompanying the photo shoot, to which the thirty-year-old (born in 1985) kindly complies, who one could swear from the sixties with her half-ponytail high , her bangs and her eyeliner lines, was not the very 2020s jeans-sneakers combo. We are, in this mid-February, at the bar of L’Hotel, in the 6and district of Paris. Here died, in 1900, aged 46, Oscar Wilde – ” My darling, said Eva Bester. I dedicated my master’s thesis to him. » Today, the establishment boasts five stars. The decoration of the bar, deliciously loaded, accumulates carpet with leopard pattern, velvet sofas and heavy hangings. When Wilde arrived there in 1898, broken by the prison that his homosexuality had earned him, “it was a dump”assures Eva Bester of its rapid flow. “I imagine him wandering here fallen. When he goes out and meets André Gide in the street, the latter, who knows him nevertheless, does not greet him. This is one of the reasons why I hate Gide. The other being that he preferred ‘on the other hand’ to ‘on the other hand’. says laughingly the one whose emissions testify to the pronounced taste for what she calls “the words that wear a bow tie”.
Try not to destroy yourself
Oscar Wilde brings us back to the question of drunkenness, since the mastery – we did not yet say master – that Eva Bester devoted to the writer dealt with “hedonism in The Picture of Dorian Gray “. She specifies: “It’s a hedonism in which alcoholics, drug addicts, anyone trying to fill a gap can recognize themselves, which, let’s face it, makes a lot of human beings in the end. In order not to clash, in order not to be alone with himself, Dorian Gray constantly seeks novelty, wants his senses to be constantly stimulated, which is impossible without burning himself and the people around him. » Giving up drinking was Eva Bester’s way of trying, ” for the first time “, not to destroy themselves. The one who, moreover, politely refuses to dwell on childhood, family or private life confesses bluntly (we would bet she likes “ambiges”) and even with a smile: “Fuck myself is a recurring idea with me, but I know I won’t. Anyway, before quitting drinking, I had tried everything to try to get better, shrinks, spells, hypnosis… but not that. » The young woman in perky despair has “hard to believe”and yet, “ [sa] life has improved considerably since then. On the one hand, this bulimic reader, with two municipal library cards, has gained a lot of time and concentration to devote to this activity. On the other hand, his relationships with people also benefited: “Contrary to what those who drink believe, what is exchanged on an empty stomach is much deeper than the confessions of drunks. We are friends for good reasons. »
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