After years of trial and error, boredom, doubt and blank pages, author, columnist and screenwriter Guy Fournier agreed to seriously put his memories of 92 years of life in order. This exercise came about Never two without me: a biography full of sometimes light anecdotes and sometimes painful memories, written in collaboration with the author Pierre Huet. The newspaper spoke in detail with the father about the unforgettable characters of Banana peel and from Never two without you.
Mr. Fournier, you reveal in your book that you have lung cancer. How are you doing?
“It’s not bad. The side effects of the treatments are a bit annoying, but they’re definitely more bearable than death, although apparently death isn’t as unbearable as people say. [rires]. Also the fact that I feel like my car can drive to CHUM with my eyes closed because I’m there so often. With treatments now occurring every six weeks, side effects have doubled but hospital visits have halved. All in all, I’m not feeling bad.”
Photo agency QMI, JOEL LEMAY
Is that one of the reasons why you want to publish your biography now and tell everything?
“I hesitated about writing a biography for 20 years. I signed my first contract when I was 75, I wrote 25, 30 pages and it pissed me off and I stopped because then it was difficult and very boring for me to talk about myself and what I was doing. I didn’t understand the meaning. The second time I signed a publishing contract, I also quit. Later I saw the publishing director again, who said to me: Why don’t you write your biography? And I replied: I will write it when I am old! To which I was told: But you are old! But I stopped again. It was purely by chance that I saw Pierre Huet again at a dinner at Richard Martineau’s. Together they convinced me. Writing is very difficult and a very lonely sin, and the best way to push yourself to do it is to let someone force you to do it. I wrote every day for a year and told myself that if I was going to bother writing a biography, I wanted to be honest, whether it was positive or negative. Make people understand the times in which I also lived.”
You talk about many very personal things, including the attacks you suffered as a child at the hands of a priest. Did it feel good to put it on paper?
“Who wasn’t back then? [agressé]? It wasn’t difficult and I wanted to provide the real names. My lawyers told me that wasn’t a good idea, to which I replied: I don’t care! That priest did so many things wrong, we need to know he was an asshole! I experienced two or three seizures when I was young, at 6 or 7 years old, you don’t really realize it. My brother and I managed to defend ourselves against the priest in question. My youngest brother couldn’t defend himself. I spoke of it to avenge him.”
Your twin’s death did not occur when you began writing your biography [Claude Fournier est décédé le 16 mars 2023]. It must have been difficult for you to add the final chapters of your biography dealing with his death and your illness, which you met a few months before his death?
“I was on the last pages of the biography when he died. I thought about changing the beginning, then I said to myself: I’ll pretend he’s not dead. It was a very hard blow and soon after I lost my other brother too. Losing the twin is truly like losing half of me. I still think about it all the time. It was and is a very difficult time.”
Your love life plays a very important role in this book, as it has in your life. Why do you think you charmed women so much?
“It seems that I really like women and it shows. This is what the women in my life have told me. I asked each of them [il a été marié à cinq reprises] When we parted, what they would regret, and everyone answered me: my kitchen [rires].”
Photo agency QMI, JOEL LEMAY
You take the opportunity to make your mea culpa for several things, including your seductive temperament and certain inappropriate gestures you may have committed in the past (and which you associate with the #metoo movement). Was it important for you to do this at this point in your life?
“There were few inappropriate acts and times in the 1960s and 1970s were very different to today, but I know I may have done it accidentally. It seemed important to me to talk about this because you can’t have loved women so much without wanting to explain yourself on this topic. I was an uncle, I know that. And frankly, I’m amazed that men have changed so quickly, as has undoubtedly happened with the shock of the #metoo movement. I’m trying to be careful in what I say now. It seemed important to apologize in the current climate.”
You talk in detail about life and the women in your life and your famous friends. How did these women make you who you are today?
“Each of them changed me, but the one who did the best job was Louise Deschâtelets. She was the best at teaching. With her I learned two important things: punctuality and openness in my human relationships, especially with women. This is probably why I have better relationships with others. We still call each other every week and still eat together often.”
What did you really want to say in your biography?
“I had no choice but to say to myself: I will talk about everything. I ended up forgetting a few things, but it’s already long enough. It was important for me to talk about my life as a couple, which took up a lot of time in my life. I still have a reputation for being a womanizer. I wish I was a one-woman man, but hey…I’ve had five wives and I realize how much I would have missed out on with just one wife. It’s not easy or model-worthy, of course, but it makes for a pretty rich life. I don’t regret anything at all. I regret nothing. I had a much nicer life than I could have expected as a teenager and teenager, and I was quite moody and very withdrawn. Every woman has changed me for the better.”
What do you consider to be your greatest success?
“The most difficult thing for me was the launch of Télévision Quatre-saisons, that was a very difficult time. What I think has worked best is the Cinema Act, which remains a permanent thing. The commission I chaired [en 2003, il a été nommé président de l’Académie canadienne du cinéma et de la télévision] and the law, which resulted in particular in the abolition of the censorship authority SODEQ, of films that were no longer presented only in English… I am very happy and very proud of that. It is a work that continues to be useful and has enabled the emergence of cinema in Quebec.”
Do you still have plans at 92?
“The biography gave me back the desire to write. I have a somewhat crazy project: it should be a children’s story, which is what I did at the beginning of my career with La Boîte à Surprises. I want to do this project with my great-granddaughter Océane, who is an illustrator, and I want it to be as good as Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince, no less! [rires] And once I can write my columns and make dinner every night, I find life pretty enjoyable.
- Excerpt from the biography of Guy Fournier, Never two without me, which will be released on November 13th
“Luckily we worked well together because this biography could easily have been posthumous. Yes, a medical examination has now revealed that I suffer from lung cancer. Since when? I don’t know. The tumor is too big to remove and I’m too old for surgery. That’s why I’ve been on immunotherapy since April 18th, which is supposed to last two years. But there’s no guarantee I’ll live long enough to finish it. Another misfortune awaits me. Much bigger than this cancer, which I may have attributed to quitting smoking for too long half a century ago.
I started this book talking about my twin brother, not knowing that I would end up talking about him too. I was born with Claude, grew up with him, studied with him, worked with him, associated with him, and argued with him. Near or invisible, he was always there. Like gravity. Anyone who has read this book knows that I am an incorrigible romantic, with the good and bad sides that that entails. As a romantic, I always thought, without much logic or scientific evidence, that my twin and I would leave this world at the same time. The best hypothesis is that one day, each of us behind the wheel of our car, like clumsy centenarians who should no longer have a driver’s license, we will come face to face on a stretch of road on the Île-des-Sisters, where we both live.
Then, last January, I returned from a routine check-up at the hospital. People my age take more tests than a young athlete who is suspected of doping. In my case, the suspicion turned out to be correct: I was diagnosed with lung cancer. Which, surprisingly, is good news. In fact, it seems that for old people like me, Cancer is a kind of winter bear, wishing for spring to come as late as possible. So we let him sleep in peace.
I immediately thought of my twin. While I was stricken there with the most terrible disease, Claude showed off every day and demonstrated outside the Russian Consulate in 10-zero temperatures to protest the invasion of Ukraine. We weren’t old enough to meet in person and my health was failing. Therefore, I would be the first to know the end result of this wonderful co-production of our lives. On March 16, 2023 at 2:12 p.m. my twin died.” (pages 428-429)