Panayotis Pascot, The Next Time You Bite the Dust: “I wrote to sleep at night”

The actor Panayotis Pascot publishes his first novel The Next Time You Bite the Dust, (Stock). A rant, a diary in which the author has a nervous pen, sometimes crude words to talk about homosexuality and depression. It’s about love, the difficulty of loving and loving oneself. He spoke to us about it during the podcast “Le moment des livres”, broadcast on September 11.

LE FIGARO. - You are known as a comedian. Why did you switch to the novel?

Panayotis PASCOT. - It was a choice that was imposed on me. I started writing because I was trying to sleep at night. I have insomnia and I need to put my parasitic thoughts somewhere so that they go away. After a while, I realized that I was writing, and that I wasn't making a joke. The more I progressed, the more I discovered a territory and I realized that it was a book.

So you wrote at night?

Yes. Strangely, I have balls of emotion like magma inside me. It grows over a few days and once I put them down on paper I feel better. I can fall asleep and move on, until it comes back up and I write again.

Also read: Panayotis Pascot, the comedian is a hit in bookstores

In this book, you feel beside yourself, both angry and outside of yourself. You also write that you feel empty. In what emotion did you write it?

I think I have a lot of misunderstandings and that’s what annoys me: being on the sidelines of life. I often have this feeling, indeed, of being elsewhere. It's something I'd like to control, but I think I'm in the phase of my life where I have to give up control to be happy, even if I still struggle...

Your book is also a novel about the difficulty of loving yourself. Can we say that this is a love book?

Yes, it's the story of someone learning to love themselves, learning to love their father and letting people into themselves. This is what is special for a boy who was educated to always be hermetic, in control, closed to external impulses.

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You also talk about the difficulty of being a man through sexuality and conventions. What does it mean for you to be a man today?

I think it’s having the chance to no longer ask the question. It is no longer being in representation, no longer living to prove that we know how to live, that we know how to be. I think it’s letting yourself be experienced.

You write, speaking of your father: “Perhaps I should wait until he is dead to write the book.” Were you afraid of hurting your loved ones by writing?

When I write, I do it for me. I see a book as a territory to conquer and once the territory is there, that's when I tell myself that I would definitely show people around. My relatives read it and no one was bothered by anything. It’s a book about a prism, about a child who becomes an adult, who tries to understand what is happening around him.

Is it more difficult to write or to know that you will be read?

It’s more difficult to know that you’re going to be read. When I wrote, I was trying to sleep, it was almost medicinal, and then suddenly there were people with whom what I wrote resonated. I receive a lot of messages. It's a very strange feeling.