There are moments one always remembers.
Tying your shoelaces without help for the first time.
Staying upright on a bicycle without training wheels.
The first time you take the exit ramp off the 405, dazed and slightly out of breath, heart racing.
And then there is the first moment you picked up a copy of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone.
Turned the pages to that unforgettable opening:
“Mr. and Mrs. Dursley, of number four, Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much.”
Early 2003 or late 2002.
An apartment in Ventura, California.
I’ll never forget the edition—Scholastic, mass market paperback. It quickly became the most precious book I’d opened in a long time.
How long did it take me to read it? A day? Maybe two. No more.
The trip to the bookstore to buy the second book became the most important item on my to-do list. And the sadness, after finishing Book Four—knowing there would be a long wait before Book Five—felt, at the time, like a kind of loss. (Goodness, I still remember the trip to Waldenbooks to get my preordered copy of Book Five, and later, reading Book Six on the tram up to Universal Citywalk where I worked at that time.)
Of course the books were about me.
Harry was me. Hermione was me. Luna, Snape, McGonagall. They were all me in some way or another.
I was no different from any other reader in believing that I belonged on the train to Hogwarts. Recognition. Resonance. It was all there. It was powerful.
Imagine, then, being one of the two boys, in 1999, auditioning for the lead role.
Daniel Radcliffe…
…and the other one.
Numéro Deux.
The novel by David Foenkinos is about that other boy.
Fictionalized, but real in essence. Because of course there was another boy.
Foenkinos names him Martin Hill.
The son of John Hill, of London, and Jeanne, of Paris.
The first chapters recount how John and Jeanne met, how they fell in love on a stroll to a cemetery after making love. The years pass. On her side, love gives way to disillusionment. By the time Martin is ten, he is the child of a broken home, traveling alone between his parents on the Eurostar.
I listened to the audiobook of Second Best, the English-language edition of Numéro Deux. Translated by Megan Jones and read by Joe Thomas.
I hit pause midway through Chapter 30, just after the crushing moment when the rejection lands. That was when I went back to the beginning just to make sure I hadn’t missed anything. The analogies are poignant. It’s fiction, but it’s real life too.
A novel like this one doesn’t depend on suspense. There is curiosity, yes—anticipation—but the real question is what happens after.
What happens to Martin once he is not chosen?
How does he cope?
The short answer: about as well as you might expect for a ten-year-old.
Even one already acquainted with disappointment. A child who has learned, early, what it means to be in transit—shuttled back and forth across the Channel between his parents, like an object in motion, not entirely belonging to either side.
Jane Austen once observed—in Sense and Sensibility—that it is the sense of singularity that sharpens suffering.
There is, perhaps, a strange consolation in knowing one is not alone.
Many children experience the fracture of a broken home. That knowledge does not remove the pain, but it places it within a shared condition.
But this—missing the role of Harry Potter by a single decision, a single difference between you and the one who was chosen—this is something else.
We all experience rejection. Even at ten.
Not being picked for the school play. Being passed over in a game of dodgeball.
But the role of Harry Potter—the rarity of it, the magnitude of it—is matched only by the scale of its loss.
It is not only the rejection that stings.
It is the feeling that it is about him—that he failed, that he lacked something essential.
Worsened by the sense that it happened to him alone.
There is only one Numéro Deux.
This line from Chapter 29 is devastating:
“As the years pass, little by little, we learn how to endure life's blows. Human life can, perhaps be summarized as a constant trial through disillusionment, which culminates in the successful, or unsuccessful way of managing pain.”
For the reader—listener, in my case—the pain is not felt through Martin alone, but through his parents as well.
Foenkinos imagines that John takes it personally. He internalizes the loss, as if the failure could be traced back to him—to something flawed, something insufficient, something passed down.
A problematic inheritance.
As though the difference—the small, elusive difference—has always been there, waiting, long before the audition ever took place.
Small, decisive, impossible-to-articulate differences. That’s what fate or luck comes down to.
Foenkinos reminds us, again and again throughout the book, that great things hinge on small moments.
A producer decides—years earlier—that he will never deliver bad news except in person. A rule born of compassion. And yet, in practice, it makes the blow worse.
A cough, in a throwaway moment.
A chance meeting in a place one does not usually go.
We call it fate. Or luck—if it ends well.
But if it ends badly?
“As luck would have it.”
As though luck were always lucky.
Of course it isn’t. Sometimes it’s rotten.
Bad luck.
What is it, really, but disappointment reduced to something trite? A way of softening the truth?
Your hopes and dreams hinge on small, contingent encounters. A change in trajectory brought about by something as slight as a cough, or one person’s fleeting perception of another’s fragility.
Since my mother joined the MFA program at LSU, I’ve known many actors. One was my stepfather—though not technically so. (I wrote about him here, shortly after his death early in 2023.) I just can’t help thinking of people like John Mese and Derek Sitter when I think about the pain of rejection after an audition on which one has pinned so much hope.
Because no matter how successful an actor becomes, that success is built on repeated exposure to that sting.
And yet a role like Harry Potter—that is something else entirely.
The one in a million.
The jackpot. The lottery to end all lotteries.
Harry Potter is not just a role. It is an experience. A universal one.
If you read those books—if you felt them, and returned to them, again and again—then you have a stake in it.
A share in this strange market, where the currency is hope, and the transaction is something like magic.
The second part of the story is difficult to get through. Alarming, triggering physical abuse—an explicit parallel to the abuse Harry Potter suffers at the hands of the Dursleys. That was the most difficult thing for me. I felt rage toward Martin’s mother, Jeanne, for her obliviousness and the absence that allowed the abuse to continue.
Martin’s inner turmoil gets worse as he can’t find the words to articulate his pain. He wants to talk, but he can’t form the words. The words just get stuck somewhere, unreachable.
Withdrawal deepens the pain.
Foenkinos refers to a “hierarchy of pain.” Whenever a new Harry Potter book comes out, that is the pinnacle. The film adaptations are next in degree of pain. There is a devastating moment when Jeanne, a journalist, conspires to confront J.K. Rowling, hoping for some guidance or some kind of sign that might help Martin, only to have J.K. Rowling cancel the interview at the last minute.
Martin notices the parallels between the Harry Potter universe and his own. He feels the likeness between his stepfather and Voldemort, between his stepbrother and Dudley Dursley. It’s as if, on some level, the abusers of Martin sense the fragility inside him and derive pleasure from exposing it. It’s a literal reign of terror, as
Martin’s dread of the abuse adds fuel to an already roaring fire—the anticipation of it amounts to “the greatest achievement of a tormenter—to provoke a kind of muted terror without having to do a thing.” (Part II, Chapter XXII.)
There is a fundamental craving in us: to be wanted—not for use, but for value—and to feel that we have been chosen.
To know that what is inside us is not merely acceptable, but good. Worth loving.
At the age of ten, Martin felt all of this but didn’t know how to trace it. It just morphed into pain with no apparent cause, shame with nowhere to go but deeper inside. There’s a dramatic event at the end of the second part that leads into Part III and feels like a slow exhale. It’s a reprieve. As a listener, I literally exhaled at this juncture. I felt my body relax.
At the age of ten, Martin feels all of this without knowing how to name it.
It gathers instead as pain without a clear source. Shame with nowhere to go but inward.
At the end of the second part, something shifts.
A dramatic event—one that opens into Part III—and it feels, quite simply, like an exhale.
As a listener, I felt it physically. My body relaxed.
The abuse is over. Martin finds a measure of peace.
I love that one of his refuges is the Louvre.
The Louvre is so vast, so overwhelming in its beauty, that it becomes more than a sanctuary. It becomes something unreal.
Reality stops at the turnstile. It cannot enter.
Inside, everything is suspended.
Martin notices the painting that hangs opposite the Mona Lisa: The Wedding at Cana, by Paolo Veronese.
And he draws a quiet analogy.
In the presence of the chosen one, everything else recedes.
We know how this works. We gather before the Mona Lisa. We give it our attention, our reverence.
And just across the room—something immense, luminous, extraordinary—remains, for the most part, unseen.
A Numéro Deux.
Not lesser.
But living, always, in the shadow of what has been chosen.
Martin now has one of life’s rarest gifts: space.
Space to simply be.
He works in the Louvre, largely unnoticed. And for once, that is not a curse, but a relief.
Here, he can breathe.
He doesn’t have to speak.
He doesn’t have to perform.
He doesn’t have to pretend that everything is all right.
For once, everything is.
He is all right.
Nothing is resolved. Nothing has been repaired.
But something essential has shifted.
For the first time since early childhood, there is space around him—space around his thoughts, his feelings.
They are no longer pressing in on him from all sides.
They can exist.
And so can he.
We are close to the end.
The space he has found allows something to open. Slowly.
There is movement forward, then retraction. He opens, something triggers him, he closes again. He experiments with ways of coping. There is a brief turn toward alcohol. There are small advances.
And then, something steadier.
At the Louvre, he finds a place that suits him. A promotion. A rhythm. A form of belonging that leads, gradually, to friendship.
It is not transformation. It is not resolution.
But it is movement.
The real beauty comes in the final chapters, in an unexpected meeting between Martin and Daniel Radcliffe.
Here, fiction and reality collide in a way that feels almost impossible—and yet entirely right.
It is a daring choice: to bring a real person into a fictional life.
Foenkinos does it with remarkable care.
Radcliffe enters the story not as a likeness, but as an opposite. Not a reflection, but an alternative.
The life that was chosen.
And what emerges from their encounter is something quietly extraordinary.
Not triumph. Not vindication.
Recognition.
Because Radcliffe, too, has suffered.
He, too, has wondered about the other boy.
The one who was not chosen.
The Numéro Deux.
And he has asked himself a question that unsettles everything:
Would that life have been better?
What if the one who was chosen carries his own version of the loss?
What if the difference—the small, decisive difference—does not lead to a better life, only a different one?
It is a strange gift, to imagine meeting the version of yourself who received what you lost.
To speak with the one who was chosen where you were not.
To see, in that encounter, not superiority or failure, but divergence.
Two lives, shaped by a moment too small to name.
And in that recognition, something loosens.
What once felt suffocating now feels manageable.
Hopeless turns into possibility.
We all want to be Harry. Chosen, valued, validated.
One child got to be him on the screen.
But perhaps being Harry was never the point.
Perhaps the point is to choose ourselves.
Because in our own story, we’re not ‘the other one.’