Paul Serge Forest is probably the doctor with the most humor and imagination in town. Even if nothing leads one to believe it a priori when meeting him, as the author of the great success Everything is ori – and brand new Wear the mask – embodies calm and reserve.
“I know my books are completely crazy,” he says with a laugh. But isn’t he a bit eccentric himself? “An inner eccentric, for sure.”
As our conversation progresses, as we try to understand how all the crazy ideas that run through this second novel full of humor came to him, we quickly understand that we are not dealing with a doctor like the others.
“It was important to me that it be funny. In fact, it’s important in my whole life that I’m funny. Humor is one of my values. And in my work as a doctor, I practice it – a bit like Thomas, in the book, who wants to be funny.”
PHOTO CHARLES WILLIAM PELLETIER, SPECIAL COLLABORATION
Paul Serge Forest
He agrees, Wear the mask is a novel that contains “many, many things.” But above all, he insists, it is the story of a couple, Thomas and Marguerite, who are trying to have a child. “A project that they are pursuing with great pleasure,” he says with a smile, and which is thwarted by the arrival of the mysterious Tennessee virus.
Like him, Thomas is a doctor, and he finds himself confined in a motel converted into a hospital, where people affected by this disease land up, which deprives them of any form of expression by attacking… punctuation. Stories of espionage and smuggling are mixed in with all this – and he even gives a nod to his first novel, Everything is originalRobert-Cliche prize, which was a great success when it was released in 2021.
From medicine to writing
Almost a year before the publication of Everything is originalwhen he learned that his manuscript was going to be published, Paul Serge Forest was struggling with another virus that was monopolizing the attention of the entire planet. “I found myself working in a COVID hotel for a year, revising Everything is original and to have lots of good ideas for a next novel.”
And he had to use this abundant creativity on a daily basis to treat people, when we still knew absolutely nothing about COVID-19.
My goal in the novel was also to bring out a kind of tenderness in all of that. Because there are bits where it talks a lot about care. And in care, like it or not, there is creativity and tenderness too.
Paul Serge Forest
On the other hand, Paul Serge Forest did not seek to spare the current health system in Wear the maskthis bureaucracy for which he feels what he calls “a healthy contempt.” Writing thus serves as an outlet for him since it allows him to express himself while having fun. It even helps him, he adds, to be a better doctor – he who dreamed, when he was younger, of being a writer, to the point of studying literature for a year before changing direction.
“At first, I experienced writing and medicine as two very separate things. But more and more, through writing and practicing medicine, I realize that they are a bit the same thing. Being a doctor means having people in my office and I have to make them tell their story in a way that is intelligible to me, as a doctor and as a human. You have to facilitate other people’s stories and be sensitive to that, necessarily – not always to heal, but to care.”
“When you have characters,” he adds, “you have to get to know them and quietly try to help them tell their story. Sensitivity to the story is important in both. It’s the same desire, very similar exchanges. As much as being a doctor helps me write, on the other hand, writing really helps me be a better doctor.”
If you happen to come across a doctor who looks a little too closely at his patients’ books in the waiting room, or who recommends reading material to them, as he sometimes does, you may well have come across Paul Serge Forest – a pseudonym he adopted to “protect the special nature of this relationship” with his patients, he says.
But wait, there is also a second reason behind this choice, he insists to tell us while we had already moved on to another subject. “It seems to me that every time we can have a pseudonym in life, we should take one. Our real name, it’s too boring!”, he says with laughing eyes, with this humor that we now recognize as his.
Wear the mask
VLB
536 pages