Dany Turcotte tells his story, beyond laughter

This is perhaps what explains the wonderful and great excitement that Dany Turcotte says he is feeling, a few days before the official launch on Thursday.

“I’m also a prudish person, and here I write very personal things in the book. So the questions worry me,” he says, laughing, at the start of the interview with The Daily — who was also his first employer at the age of 14.

Quickly, the memory of these heavy newspapers carried like pedestals in childhood, for purposes more existential than material, takes us back to his youth in Jonquière. Which he tells without detour or white gloves, with the beautiful as well as the bad, in his book entitled D. Turcotte & fils.

Almost everything goes there. The “spectacular”, endless, drunken Christmas parties. The smoke from the local factories, which mixes with that of cigarettes, so dense that it stings the eyes of the children in the basement. Driving around without a seat belt, drunk, with beer between your legs.

Several storms

And also the ups and downs of Dany Turcotte’s father, “Tit-Luc”. Dazzling, in both cases.

“He started from nothing, and he still built a big business. As much as his bipolar illness led him to lose it, it also led him to create something big. At the time, the word bipolar did not exist. We didn’t know what it was, so we said our father was special,” underlines the author and comedian.

Before adding that these two very different lives that he lived, before and after the bankruptcy of the family business, will have made him aware of the value – and the ephemeral side – of money. While making him “stronger”, in the face of the “headwinds” that life would blow in his direction.

“This is exactly the moment when The Daily happened in my life, laughs Dany Turcotte. I had no choice but to spend it, to buy linen and all sorts of things.”

In interviews, as in writing, the former Fool always opens with this astonishing mixture of sincerity, humor and self-deprecation. Weapons that will have been beneficial to him, he says, over a journey punctuated by several storms.

The most difficult of which to revisit was the accident of her ex-spouse, André. Became a quadriplegic overnight. “It was extremely painful to write. Especially the moment he came back to spend the holidays in our house, where I had not been prepared at all to do the care. I didn’t know exactly what that entailed, and I suddenly found myself being a caregiver,” confides Dany Turcotte.

“Writing these bits, I spent hours feeling extremely sad and nostalgic. But at the same time, that’s the therapeutic side of it. Writing it relieves you, it heals the wounds. Then I’m happy to have done it, because it pays a lot of homage to André. I talk about the greatness of the character, how he was a unique being.”

— Dany Turcotte

Pay homage

Speaking of homage, the author devotes several pages in his biography – a word he doesn’t really like – to his ultimate accomplice and friend, Dominique Lévesque. Always finding new words to describe his beautiful madness, his sweet extravagance, his boundless dedication.

Among other things, he recounts his not-so-promising meeting with him, in Jonquière. The deep complicity that eventually emerged during the impressive journey of the Sanguin Group. His annoyance with his “parrot host,” Bayou.

Just like the sleepless nights of creation, the endless tours, the formative trips, and of course the disappearance, again tragic, of Dominique.

“I found it important to recount my relationship with him, from the beginning when we didn’t really like each other, to the moment when we became brothers. It’s a story of friendship spanning 40 years, it’s immense. We became inseparable, and unfortunately we were separated by life. But there isn’t a day when I don’t think about him.”

“With André, and my friend Benoit Léger – with whom I did The little seduction -, they are like my ghosts. In my dreams, I alternate from one to another. They are part of me,” added Dany Turcotte.

By speaking about them so openly, at the same time as these other difficulties encountered, for example towards the end of his journey at Everyone is talking about itthe author somewhat challenges this “DNA of a man who does not dare to speak”. Inherited from the men of his family, who will all have suffered from it.

He will deal with it more broadly in his second book, this time entirely fictional, to be published next year by Éditions Libre Expression. “It’s at the center of the novel. “Silent masculinity, these feelings that men don’t talk about,” notes the man who feels in his place, currently, in the world of writing.

In the shorter term, D. Turcotte & fils will be launched this Thursday, by Éditions La Presse. And Dany Turcotte will come to present it in person, in his native region, on October 17 at the Librairie Marie-Laura in Jonquière.