“I have never been happy in my life and it just happened to me,” says Ophélie Winter.

After having seen his life sprawl out in the pages of the press people, Ophélie Winter takes back control of his story. The 1990s idol unveiled on Wednesday Resilience, an autobiography in which she retraces her career, her successes and her loves. She also reveals her slack periods, the many hardships she has had to face and her fight against illness. At the end of this long road strewn with joys and sorrows? An incessant quest to let go and a dream of serenity.

Despite a certain fatigue, – she has been doing interviews for several days – it is a cheerful Ophélie Winter that 20 minutes met on the day of her book’s release. With a disarming naturalness, she confided unvarnished about this life in roller coaster.

Why did you wait so many years to talk about these ordeals?

I have already waited for the death of my uncle, and of my grandmother, because she would not have understood, I think. At one point I was looking at my Insta and the last pictures I posted were just my lovers, my guys, my friends, who were dying. I was the one who was supposed to die younger than everyone else. And in fact I’m the only one left and I tell myself that maybe it’s time to put down this bag of concrete blocks and explain how we can get out of… I’ve never been happy in my life and it just happened to me. I’ve been happy for six months.

Do you really feel happy now?

Yes. I didn’t have a comparison, I didn’t know happiness so I didn’t miss it. I had a bit of a tendency to shoot my future marriages, when I got engaged and wanted to get married. But every time I left. I have a thing about destroying potential happiness, if it really exists. There’s a line from Einstein that says, I can’t remember the way he said it, but basically it’s’ don’t wait for that to change if you keep doing the same thing every day. days “. This sentence stuck in my head for a long time and I told myself that if I don’t change my attitude, if I don’t put my bag down, if I don’t speak, my life won’t change. I didn’t want to hide in there.

Was confiding in such intimate matters difficult, or on the contrary, quite liberating?

It was super long. It took a year to do it, in the meantime I was sick, I spent two months in the hospital, so we had to put the book on hiatus, but I almost died again. It was epic. Everyone thought I wasn’t going to release it, either I was going to die or say I didn’t care… It was complicated but I’m super happy I managed to finish it. I wanted the fans to recognize me when I speak in writing: my bullshit, my valves, the distance and the humor I have in all situations. I find it is also a key that I give them to do 4×4 in life. You go everywhere with humor, it defuses anxiety.

This book is called “Resilience”. What does this word mean to you?

If I had to put the “equal” sign next to it, I would put “freedom”. The moment I put down my bag of concrete blocks, it’s very colorful but it’s really that, no one wonders why we carry this fucking bag, with our anxieties, the family stuff… Everyone wears it . The fact of asking this thing, of not having any more particular addresses. I no longer want to say “I live here”. Hence the stupid things to say that I am homeless because they saw me in trucks making my move with friends… Since that event, resilience is being able to go to the airport, to ask where I’m going, to try things I would never have dared to do before, to take an apartment and live there for six months, discover a culture… It’s freedom.

You mention several family abandonments in your life, that of your father, then your mother later. Is it possible to recover from this feeling of abandonment in your opinion?

I don’t think we can do it without a shrink. We draw hasty conclusions from our personal perception of the situation, which in general is wrong. For example I thought I had problems with men… I had completely hidden my uncle’s thing, eh [dans son livre, Ophélie Winter révèle avoir été victime d’attouchements par son oncle maternel]. It was my shrink who was a Jungian and who made me talk. Suddenly the file came out of the brain. I heard myself say it and I said to myself ohlala… I had really hidden that.

Throughout your career, a feeling of illegitimacy has haunted you. You speak several times of this “impostor syndrome”. Did you manage to get rid of it?

Now yes. This was before I knew I was diagnosed as gifted, and it’s also a gifted thing to think of being a scam permanently alive. I sincerely thought so. Now no. People who wonder about themselves in general have brains.

Artistically, an image has stuck to your skin for a long time: that of a “playback” singer, reduced to her physique, her blondness … Looking back, do you have the feeling that you have been particularly the victim of misogyny?

Yes a bit. The bosses of record companies were all guys, in the studio the same. Prince taught me how to use it and at the time I was kind of the only sound engineer girl, it drove them crazy! I would take them out of the studio, we were near a tennis court, and I would tell them “go play tennis”! I plugged the microphone into the console and told them that when they came back it would be over, mixed mastered! It is not a job for women, but what is the job for women in fact? Where we are not harassed, belittled … Frankly?

Did you really feel that it was harder to be successful when you were a woman?

But clear! In the United States, I had an appointment with an agent, that of Leonardo Dicaprio after Titanic, it was a bother to have a date with him. And the guy says to me “go under the table”? Clearly what! I broke. And in France too… Limit of being pretty in itself that does not help. I’m talking about when I was young huh.

You are still pretty!

Not so much no.

At the time we called you “Ophélaï”, did you like that nickname?

We invented it with Mademoiselle Agnès and my stylist at the time, we were called the witches of Eastwick all three, we were all the time crammed together. And we had invented the language of “aï”, it was “Ophelaï”. We had even started to make a small dictionary, we really wanted to launch a language. It’s really 90! Even my real friends call me Ophelai. It’s “no worries” [à prononcer no souçaï].

You sang in particular “God gave me faith”. You have faith in what, in whom today?

Always the same: in God and in me! It’s a duo that works well. I understood that as long as I was honest with myself, I was honest with God. I can get to the end of a cliff and it always catches up with me. Nothing dramatic ever happens to me because I’m a good person and I’ve been paying my ticket for a while… He saves me every time. “God gave me faith” is still relevant today. I don’t see anyone anymore, I’m super wild, I’m a wolf, my friends call me the “wolf”. I stay with God what. And I like being in countries that are a little warm, in the morning you can feel the energy of the sea, of the sun, that’s a lot!

You talk about the destructive relationship the media had with you. Is it difficult today to have to go back to interviews for this book?

No, I’m cool, I have nothing to hide, I’m relaxed …

You don’t have any bitterness towards the press?

It is not the same, there are the torch-asses and the press. They slaughtered me, it was horrible to read, and god knows I haven’t read everything. It killed me, such relentlessness on a person, who was also inactive at work. I had been gone for 10 years. What was their delirium? Where did they remember me from? And why had they decided to say that I lived outside? It cost me an arm and a leg, I know I paid for it… But I’m not mixing everything up.

Don’t you find that the way the media looks at you has changed a bit?

I don’t know, but on TV I find myself much better received. I am a bit of a ghost, and since they think that what was written about me is true – which is not the case – for them I was really on the street, ruined, dead, I don’t know what . They see me arrive with the banana, in neon pink, to do my bullshit and be nice, they are happy what! The French like the resurrection. Which is also the title of my last album. Afterwards, when I say certain things, I see that it shocks people a lot. The story of the birthday card with the noses, given by my mother [pour qu’elle se fasse refaire le nez à l’adolescence], I tell myself that it is anecdotal. BFMTV was talking about it yesterday, they were talking about my book and that’s the only thing they remembered? I was raped for ten years and you tell me about that? Isn’t it a weird choice?

At the end of this book, you explain that you isolated yourself from the world, in the mountains and then on an island, in order to rebuild yourself. What type of place do you live in now?

I live between Paris and Reunion. I have an illness, we will find out what it is on Thursday after all, I’ve been paralyzed in my hands and feet for six months, I can’t write, I can’t stand up… It’s very complicated. I can’t wear anything, I can’t play sports, I, who exercise two hours a day, am living a nightmare. My doctors advise me to go in the sun, as much as possible for vitamin D. I am going to have an operation because I have had giant osteoarthritis on my neck since Dance with the stars and all my paralyzes come from there. I like Reunion Island because it’s France anyway and it’s hot.

An artistic or media career, on TV for example, is it something you are considering?

Yes but then something funny, I just want to laugh! If I do it with friends and it’s nice… But not Hanouna eh! Let’s be clear… This is not to say shit about people. But something new, nice … TV I would love. I would also love to do a series because in addition in my head I need to have a niche, to know that I will work three months and then be free. There I was too much in the wild, after I had to hide, it was complicated, it was a bit like a manhunt for the past two years.