The “book about the father” is a literary exercise supposed to make an appointment with the man we did not know, who death has made more attractive, and who sometimes makes people say platitudes – “You have joined your parents in heaven, I will never see you again.” This is not the first time that we come across Jean-Michel Beigbeder in the writings of his son – he was one of the central figures of a beautiful autobiographical story, A French novel, crowned with the Renaudot in 2009. This time, it is an entire book that the author of 99 francs devotes to his father, the target of a family investigation which begins in the footsteps of a kid raised rough in a boarding school in Sorèze (in the Tarn), continues in a private college in Friborg where the young man “was in the same class as Juan Carlos de Bourbon, the future king of Spain”. And so on until the evocation of an absent father, divorced and playboy, lover of models, client of international hotels and importer of a new profession – that of headhunter for which he will be the reference.
