Marc Levy in Calgary this week.
For every aspiring novelist slogging it out at a day job in a cubicle somewhere, worried perhaps that he's missed his chance, Marc Levy offers some hope. Approaching 40 when he finished his first novel - an extension of a nightly bedtime story he'd been telling his son - Levy never intended for it to be published.
But a publisher acquired it, Steven Spielberg snapped up the rights, Reese Witherspoon and Mark Ruffalo starred in the film, the book was an international bestseller and now, with 11 novels to his name (translated into 41 languages), Levy has sold millions of books, and is the most-read French author in the world.
"I felt surprised, guilty, very embarrassed and happy," Levy said of his success during an interview this week from Calgary's Wordfest, the first stop on a Canadian tour to promote his 2008 novel All Those Things We Never Said, recently published in English.
Guilty? Embarrassed? Why?
"In France, my books over the last 11 years have been the most sold book of the year, and I never had the feeling that they were necessarily the best book of the year.
"So, yes, there is some sort of feeling guilty for the success, which is also due to the fact that I had a lot of luck. So I'm working really, really hard to try to deserve, as much as I can, this luck that life has given me."
Levy, who was born in France 49 years ago Saturday (Oct. 16), now lives in New York and has two children: Louis, 21, and George, six months. He does indeed work very hard, publishing about one novel a year. For each, after a long rumination period, he begins an intense writing process, working 15 to 17 hours a day (he only requires, he says, four hours of sleep a night), seven days a week for about four months. "Sometimes I just sleep on my chair when I write, and my wife comes and checks if I'm still breathing."
His success as an author stems directly from his efforts as a father. When Louis was five, Levy started making up a bedtime story for him, taking him into another world each night. The story developed into an elaborate ongoing series, with many characters. As it became more complicated, Levy started losing track of things. Louis noticed. So every night, after putting his son to bed, Levy spent two or three hours writing out the next day's installment.
When Louis was 9 and felt he'd had enough of his father's bedtime serial, Levy found he missed his nightly writing sessions.
"Then came the idea: If I couldn't write any more to the child he was, I would maybe write to the man he would be one day."
Levy, then 38, started writing a story that he intended to be a private dialogue with his son. Louis would read it when he was 38. "The dream was that when he read it, my son and I would be the same age. What could be better than being the same age as your son for two or three hours?"
But Levy's sister, a screenwriter, encouraged him to send the manuscript to a publisher, who accepted it immediately for publication.
The book, If Only It Were True (the film version was called Just Like Heaven), tells an impossible love story. An architect rents an apartment that used to belong to a medical resident, who is in hospital in a coma after a car crash. But she is also in his closet, acting very much alive - only to him, though. To everyone else, she's invisible.
This theme of second chances, in particular after death, is something Levy has returned to. In All Those Things We Never Said, a woman's father comes back from the dead, sort of, to set some things straight.
The book is set partly in Montreal, a city Levy visits so frequently he believes he knows it better now than Paris. He's also a frequent visitor to Quebec City. And he gets a kick out of being misidentified at times as French-Canadian.
Levy says he is not weighed down by regrets of his own. But he has seen this problem all around him, particularly during the six years he worked for the Red Cross Emergency Care Unit in Paris. Eighteen when he started, he learned early about the fragility of life, and about things left unsaid. "I heard so many times, 'If only I could have told her or told him, if only he had known.' Most of the time we have a whole life to tell the people around us what is really important, and there is this weird human thing that forbids us from doing so."
He remembers being in the car with his mother about 10 years ago and ending a telephone conversation with Louis by saying "I love you." Levy's mother suddenly said: "'My father never said "I love you" to me.' And I looked at her" - 40 years after her father's death - "and I could still see the pain.
"When we're confronted with death, we all end our grieving at some point, but there is something that never heals - which is the thing we've never been able to say."
Work-wise, Levy knows about second chances. There's been a lot of career heartbreak on the way to the top of the bestseller lists. After he resigned from the Red Cross, he started a computer graphics company. A few years later, he lost majority control and resigned. "I was thrown away… and had to start all over again."
His son had just been born and he needed an income. He took a job on a construction site. Two years later, he started a company with two friends that helped organizations deal with space planning issues in the computer age. The firm was a success, growing to more than 100 employees with big-name clients such as Coca-Cola.
This is what Levy gave up when he decided to write full time: a thriving company, a comfortable life. "When I did that, I really, really took the risk of losing everything again," Levy says, pointing out that in this regard, his success resulted not from luck, but from making a difficult decision and embarking on some hard work.
Again, he did it for Louis.
"I was just trying to say to my son: in life you're going to meet more people who will tell you what you want to do is impossible than you will meet people telling you: 'Great idea, go on!' And that's how life is. I was trying to tell him: Failing is not the problem; it's not trying. This is something you will never, never regret."
Marc Levy will appear at the Vancouver International Writers & Readers Festival Oct. 19 and again on Oct. 22 (writersfest.bc.ca) and at the International Festival of Authors in Toronto on Oct. 26 (readings.org).
Marsha Lederman