I order a white wine at the Pastis, the hip restaurant run by Keith McNally who also owns Balthazar, another French restaurant. Balthazar. I like the decor, it’s perfect—a French brasserie recreated right in the middle of the “Meat Market.” I told the woman I love that I had to go to New York alone; that’s what gave her the idea of dumping me for good. People think my life is funny, but it’s not. I can’t stick at anything. I got married, I got divorced. I had a kid, but I don’t parent. I’m in love, I run away to New York. I’m handicapped, and I’m not the only one. I live in a no man’s land: neither an INTERNATIONAL PLAYBOY or MARRIED AND PROUD OF IT. I’m indecisive and no one feels sorry for me. I’m fucked up and I’ve no right to complain. I have a crippled heart: like the song by Enrico Macias, “Le Mendiant de I’amour.” Still, it’s amazing how many thirtysome-things I know are in the same boat. Emotional cripples. Grown, vaccinated men behaving like kids. Underneath the dashing exterior is an emotional cripple. With no memories, no plans. They want to be like their fathers and at the same time they’re determined not to end up like their fathers no matter what. Fathers who abandoned them and whom they never found. I’m not criticizing them: I blame society. The sons of 1968 are men with no role models. Men with no instruction manual. Men with no solidity. Defective men. When they’re in a relationship, they feel smothered, when they’re single they’re miserable. Even their psychoanalyst is lost; he doesn’t know what else to tell them. There’s no example for them to follow. There’s no solution to the tragedy of my generation. I’m someone who only enjoys beginnings yet I’ve forgotten my childhood. I’m someone who only enjoys beginnings yet I don’t look after my child. For thousands of years we did things differently. Mom and Dad and their kids lived in the same house. Barely forty years ago, we decided to do away with the father and we want things to carry on as before? I’m the product of that disappearing father. I am collateral damage.
One morning, at 9:26 AM, I realized that I was incapable of loving anyone except myself. The day was my mirror. In the morning, I thought about what I was going to say on TV. In the afternoon, in front of the cameras, I said what I had to say. In the evening, I watched myself on TV saying it. Sometimes I’d see myself four times because it would be repeated three times. The night before, I watched the rough edit of a different program for seven hours on the trot. I spent all my time admiring my own face on a color screen, but even that wasn’t enough. I called my friends before the show to remind them when it started; I called them afterwards to make sure they’d watched it. I organized drinks parties where I left the TV on so that we could—as I said with feigned irony—”watch me in concert.”
I blame the consumer society for making me what I am: insatiable. I blame my parents for making me what I am: vague.
I blame other people to avoid blaming myself.
No memories of my childhood. Fragments, an image or two. I’m jealous of people who can recount every detail of their life as a baby. I remember nothing, a few flashes which I copy down here in no particular order, nothing more. I believe that I didn’t begin to exist until 1990 when I published my first book: a memoir, coinciden-tally. Writing restored my memory.
For example, there’s Verbier, my father’s chalet, in 1980. It is a man’s house. I like our vacations together, just guys skiing. Every night we pig out on fondue and there are no chicks around to complain about our diet. I light the fire in the hearth, Charles skis until it’s dark, Dad reads the American papers. And every morning he wakes us, my brother and me, by tickling our feet which stick out from under the Ikea duvet, trying to make up for the fact that for the first fifteen years of our lives he wasn’t there to do it.
And another one: when I was ten I started keeping a travel diary on a beach in Bali between water fights with my big brother while Dad hit on sun-drenched girls at the hotel bar. I didn’t know that I would never stop putting my life down on paper. That little green notebook: a gear still grinding inside me.
I decided to research myself. Rather than wait for Proustian flashes of “involuntary memory,” I become a reporter, I retrace my steps.
I have no memory of Neuilly-sur-Seine. Nonetheless, I was born there. In a small white private hospital. I’m from the well-heeled suburbs. That’s probably where I get my expensive tastes. I like cleanliness, neat gardens, soundless cars, nursery schools where they shoot the first hostages straight away. German governesses whom we refer to, however, as “nurses.” I see childhood as something pristine, sleek, and, for the most part, boring as hell.
I was born with a silver spoon up my ass. I’d love to tell you about the anguished childhood of an accursed artist. I envy Dave Pelzer: my life wasn’t tragic. It’s tragic how little tragedy there was.
I wasn’t a wanted child. Born seventeen months after my brother I’m one of those cases—common at the time—of an unplanned second pregnancy. The boy who arrives too early. It’s hardly a news story: the pill wasn’t legal in 1965, most children arrived unplanned. But two children make a lot more racket than one. I have to admit that in my father’s shoes, I’d have done exactly what he did: get the fuck out and fast! In fact, thirty-three years later that’s precisely what I did.
I wasn’t on the agenda, that’s how it goes, no big deal, human beings coped with such things for thousands of years. Anyway, when I finally did show up, I was lucky: I was pampered, mollycoddled, spoiled rotten, it would be churlish to whine. It’s either too much love or not enough. I’m not going to go and do a Romain Gary and complain about how my mother loved me too much! It’s very important to be traumatized by one’s parents. We need it. We are all traumatized children who traumatize our own. I’d rather be traumatized by my parents than by someone I didn’t know.
Anyway, there I was, just the same, squatting my own life. I’d invited myself to this planet. Someone had to set another place at the table for me, sorry, there’ll be less dessert for everyone. For a long time I’ve had the feeling that I am a burden to others. Hence my taste for parasitism: my life is a party where I showed up without an invite.
I discovered that television was a way to make myself desired. I wanted crowds on their knees begging me to exist. I wanted hordes of fans pleading with me to show up. I wanted to be chosen, celebrated, a celebrity. It’s ridiculous, isn’t it, the little twists of fate that make us work flat out instead of being normal?