petite anglaise

Today will see me running a few errands (too tedious to detail) and knuckling down to work on chapter 11 of book#2.

Meanwhile, Petite Anglaise will be busy leaning seductively against the Eiffel Tower in her birthday suit and killer heels in bookshops across the USA and Canada.

So far things are looking good. Petite got glowing advance reviews in Publishers Weekly, Kirkus and Booklist, and has been selected as recommended summer reading by Scoop (WWD), Self (June issue), the books editor of US Glamour and NPR (Nine First Books that Make a Lasting Impression).

My first US interview will air on this week’s edition of The Book Show and my guest post on the Window Seat has just gone live.

But if it was hard for me to get my head around being published in the UK back in March, having my life on sale in bookshops across the Atlantic is even more surreal. I’m wondering whether seeing photographic evidence of Petite “in the wild” Stateside might help me to comprehend that this really is happening. To this end, I’m willing to personally mail a signed galley to the first ten readers who upload a candid shot of the book gracing the shelves of a US or Canadian bookstore to my facebook page.

And, um, don’t forget to buy it while you’re there…

It’s a long time since I’ve written a guest post. In fact, the last time I did, back in 2004, I ended up accidentally teleporting to Manchester wearing nothing but a pair of slippers and some very fetching underwear.

So it was not without a certain amount of trepidation that I agreed to embark on a tour of five Canadian blogs, to mark the impending release of the Canadian version of ‘petite’. (And I must admit, I never did get the bottom of the ‘do the Canadians get the British English text, or the American English translation?’ question.)

But, in the end, I had tremendous fun. I got to discover five sassy ladybloggers I would likely never have come across otherwise (I suffer from lazy blogroll syndrome, meaning that I read only a handful of blogs written by good friends, these days). I got to write about Vaseline, the day Tadpole found out how babies get out of the womb, to resuscitate my gym/wrist action story (my obsession with which, as I am currently spending two hours per weekday in the gym, has recently resurfaced), and, on a more serious note, to address the thorny question of telling other people’s stories on a personal blog. Coming tomorrow, I think, will be my final guest post about my fear of wearing stilettos on my wedding day and my amusement about being portrayed in my birthday suit (and stilettos) on the North American cover of “petite”.

I’d like to say a big thank you to Catherine Her Bad Mother (a challenger for my second-place google ranking for “bad mummy“, perhaps?), to Tanis Redneck Mommy, Katherine Mama Tulip, Ali Cheaper Than Therapy and Nadine Martinis for Milk for being such gracious hosts.

Thanks also to Jana Something blue, Julie Metro Mama and Karen Kids Are Alright for participating in the advance copy giveaway.

I’m looking forward to “meeting” a few of these folks by videoconference the day before my nuptials, no less. Which should take my mind off worrying about possible uses of Vaseline on my wedding night.

A French friend of mine once pointed out to me that translating my book into French would pose an interesting set of problems. ‘The problem with using Monsieur Grenouille,’ she said, ‘is that it would sound kind of odd, because the French word for Frog is a feminine noun.’ Likewise, the French translation of Tadpole is masculine: un têtard.

This reminded me of the day Tadpole picked up the UK version of ‘petite anglaise’ and, after pointing out that she’d ‘growded a lot bigger since then and didn’t ever never ride in a pushchair any more’, she began to leaf through the pages, looking for words she recognised. ‘Why doesn’t it say my name in here mummy?’ she said, a few minutes later, in a puzzled voice. ‘You did say that I was in this story…’

‘Ah, well,’ I said, wondering how on earth to explain without hurting her feelings. ‘You see, I didn’t want people to know your real name, so I called you Tadpole. It’s a nickname. You know, like when I call you sausage, or princess curly top…’

‘But why can’t people know my real name?’ Tadpole frowned. ‘My real name is very pretty. Much more prettier than Tadpole.’

I was loath to launch into a scaremongering story about needing to respect her father’s wishes and protect my daughter’s identity from nutjobs. What is more, I sensed we were about to sucked into a ‘why-vortex’, inside of which each answer I give begets another question beginning with the word ‘why’ and, ten questions in, I inevitably end up screaming ‘because I said so’, or ‘because it just is’, or ‘I don’t know’, or locking myself in the bathroom. (Unless The Boy is on hand, in which case I simply say “why don’t you ask Manuel?”)

Now that I’ve finally found a suitable French home for ‘Petite Anglaise’, it’s only a matter of time before these thorny translation questions are resolved.

It’s also only a matter of time (sometime in the course of 2009, to be more precise) before the ex-in-laws can finally get their hands on ‘petite’ in translation. So while I’m thrilled to be published in my home country – the land of the highbrow – I’m also a touch nervous. If it was too much for my grandma, and JonnyB claimed he had to close his eyes during the sex scenes, I’m not sure where that leaves the beaux parents.

Reading the various reviews of “petite anglaise”, a few things have given me pause for thought.

One is that many readers are judging the book against everything I’ve previously written here, rather than on its merits as a book, full stop. This was inevitable. I do have a huge body of ‘work’ already out there. When I put together my book proposal – in haste – I had to make choices. Choices about which strands of my story I wanted to use. Choices about which material would appeal most to the publishers circling around me. Choices about who I wanted the book to appeal to most: my blog readers, or a wider audience? Or both?

I stand by my choices, but invariably some people would have preferred me to do everything differently. ‘I didn’t want to know about X.’ ‘I wish she’d written more about Y.’ I’m reminded of opinions aired in my comments box, along the lines of ‘I liked it better in the old days when you wrote more about Paris.’ There is something about the participative nature of blogging that gives readers a sense of ownership. Some feel entitled to tell me what they think I ought to write – as if a blog were like some sort of online ‘request show’. I reserve the right to politely disagree.

But I’ve realised there is no sense in worrying about not pleasing everyone. That would have been mission impossible: my book can’t be all things to all people. The quirk(e)y reviewer in the New Statesman wishes I’d shown more of my ‘disturbo’ side, whereas glimpses of the compulsive blogger in me made others deeply uncomfortable.

A charge levelled against the book (particularly on Amazon – a place I only go when I’m feeling masochistic) is that petite anglaise is too ‘mememe’, and that some of the secondary characters are rather one-dimensional. To the mememe charge, I’d say that when a story is narrated in the first person, you necessarily see events from a single perspective; you are only permitted a view inside one person’s head. Other characters, although they can explain themselves through their words and gestures, necessarily remain enigmatic to a greater or lesser degree. ‘Petite’ is a true story, taken from a personal blog and I didn’t have an ‘access all areas’ backstage pass into James’s or Mr Frog’s heads. If I had, many of the twists and turns of the story would have been robbed of the power to surprise and shock. As for my ‘secondary characters’, they are real people whose identities and sensibilities I had to protect. I was telling my story, from my perspective and left many of their stories out of the final cut, robbing the reader of extra insights which would, no doubt, have rounded out their characters. But I didn’t feel I had the right to go further.

I learnt a lot while writing ‘petite’. I learnt that a book is finished when you simply can’t bear to look at it any more; not when it’s ‘perfect’. I learnt that once it is written, the author has to let it go, leave the marketing people to their jobs, let them package it, add their cover blurb, and send it out into the world to fend for itself. There no point in me agonising over whether ‘petite’ should be shelved next to the latest Jordan autobiography, or in the travel section next to Peter Mayle. Or neither. In the words of Vicomte de Valmont: it’s beyond my control.

The main thing the experience of writing a personal story and laying myself open to personal criticisms has taught me is that I don’t necessarily want to do it again. No matter how many lovely emails and comments I’ve received from people who have read the book compulsively, finished it in one sitting, laughed and cried and empathised along with me and felt sad when they reached the end, at 4 am, because they wanted more.

So there will be no petite anglaise II. There will be a novel, in which I can draw on my own experiences as much or as little as I wish, fill out the secondary characters to my heart’s content and take on board the constructive criticism I’ve received and try and do better. I’m proud of what I achieved and convinced I wrote the best book I possibly could at the time.

But I hope the best is yet to come.

Petite Anglaise garnered a couple more (rather tardy) reviews in the British press this weekend. The first was in The Independent, last Friday, and gave me cause to wonder whether I shouldn’t have reinvented Mr Frog as a non smoker or extolled the virtues of Lipton yellow tea in the interests of avoiding clichéd representations of the French.

The second, in the weekend edition of the FT, references Madame Bovary (on the métro to the childminder’s). I really liked this piece – the reviewer seemed to really “get” the book.

And of course I drew no small amount of satisfaction from remembering that my former employer not only subscribed to the FT, but displayed it prominently on the glass coffee table in reception…

I’d like to say a heartfelt thank you to everyone who turned out (in the freezing cold) to listen to me read at WH Smiths last night. It was somewhat unnerving giving a reading in front of so many people (120! Wow!) but I ended up thoroughly enjoying myself and I’m eternally grateful to you all for laughing in the right places.

For those who couldn’t make it, I signed a sizeable stack of copies before I left and these may be procured from WH Smiths at your leisure (and possibly posted to you if you live elsewhere in France).

Sadly, my camera was on the blink and I’m gutted I forgot to ask The Boy to bring his and play the role of official snapper.

But I did happen to notice a few flashbulbs going off, so if you have photographic evidence you’re willing to share, I’d love to see it. You can mail snaps to the usual address, or add photos to my facebook page. I’ll pop anything I receive up on flickr and link to it from here.

And was it just my imagination, or did my accent start off BBC posh and gradually veer off in a northern direction?