troubled diva

The second thing I should tell you is this: you may not like Petite Anglaise. Its language is simple and unadorned; it nurses no lofty literary aspirations; its appeal is mass-market. It will be bought at airports, and read on sun loungers. The sort of people who “don’t normally read books” will read it, and most of them will enjoy it. If you’re the sort of person who shies away from such deliberately accessible populism, or if you’re the sort of person who likes a few more shades of purple in their prose, then I must advise you to be cautious.

The third thing I should tell you is this: you may not like Catherine Sanderson. The book’s central narrative thrust goes like this: woman starts blog, is wooed by one of her readers, and leaves the father of her child in order to embark upon a passionate relationship with him – while blogging about all of these events, as they happen, to an audience of thousands. The story is told from her point of view, with unflinching honesty. If you’re the sort of person who cannot accept any form of infidelity, for any reason and under any circumstance, then I must again advise you to be cautious.

The fourth and most important thing I should tell you is this: I like this book, and its author, a great deal. Catherine has made the transition from blogger to author with rare ease, displaying a natural ability to retell her story in the longer, smoother, less episodic, more structured format. Her language may be straightforward, but it is never banal. The lives that she describes may be commonplace, but much of the territory that she maps out is new.

For without the central presence of "petite anglaise" – both the blog and the blogger – this would be just another variation on upon a story that has been told many times before: souped-up soap opera, superior chick-lit. But what makes this story so unique is the impact that Catherine’s blog has upon the rest of her life, and upon the lives of those around her. When viewed as an extended meditation upon the effects that personal blogging can have upon “real life” – thrilling and threatening, illuminating and distorting, cathartic and toxic – then Petite Anglaise claims new ground, its deceptive lightness of touch concealing fresh, profound and sometimes disturbing insights.

As for the perceived “selfishness” of the author’s actions (an area where certain Amazon reviewers have been less than kind), I would say this: can anyone walk out on one relationship in order to start another, without having to act – to a greater or lesser degree – like a bit of a bastard, or a bit of a bitch? These things go, as they say, with the territory. With that understood, the other great strength of this book is the way that Catherine is able to describe these events – not all of which reflect upon her in the best of all possible lights – without lapsing into snivelling self-flagellation, or into manipulative self-justification. Instead, she steers a reliably clear-sighted, even-handed course through the emotional maelstrom, with full and generous consideration given to the other parties involved. (In this respect, the jilted Mr Frog comes across as an immensely sympathetic character, drawn with great affection.)

With all that said, there were passages which still made me flinch. Having spent time with Cath in real life, it was difficult to get through the book’s one brief (and entirely tasteful, and entirely necessary) sex scene without feeling that I was being bounced into the role of reluctant voyeur. Having sailed perilously close to the wind myself in this blog’s early, more confessional days, certain blogging-related episodes had me writhing with the sharp pain of recognition. And having long since pulled up my own personal shutters to what I perceive as a healthier, more manageable level, I couldn’t always shake off the nagging feeling of “Should she even be telling us this?”

All of which says more about me than it does about Catherine Sanderson: a patently gifted writer, whose words never strike a false note - and whose next, mercifully fictional work can only build on the strengths of this brave, resonant and remarkable memoir.

Labels: blogs, books, petite anglaise

The first thing I should tell you is this: my opinion on Petite Anglaise - the book of the blog - is inevitably going to be a partial one.

Way back in the summer of 2004, I received an e-mail from Petite, introducing herself and her brand new blog. Although such unsolicited e-mails are widely thought to be against the norms of blogging etiquette (as I'm sure Petite will now have realised, many times over, as yet another fresh-faced hopeful announces themselves in her Inbox), there was something about this particular e-mailer's friendly lack of guile which neutralised my customary suspicions. Moreover, there was something about her fledgling blog which immediately piqued my curiosity.

More self-interestedly, I had been spending many weeks working in Paris, with a bunch of clients who had never shown the remotest interest in how I spent my evenings. In all those months, I had only formed one social contact outside work, and so I rather liked the idea of being able to form another. With a proposed schedule that would see me spending most of the autumn in the city, I looked forward to getting to know this ex-pat Englishwoman with a gift for well-worked observational vignettes of Parisian life.

More unfortunately, I was also in the middle of a nasty and prolonged depressive episode, which had been triggered by a sequence of health problems arising from a gruelling holiday in Peru. No longer capable of sustaining my cheerful online persona, I had let the blog slide into disuse, and had more or less stopped replying to all but the most pressing personal e-mails.

And so Petite's friendly announcement went unanswered, and her promising new blog initially failed to make it into my list of regular reads. Even so, I linked to one of her early posts, and received another equally friendly e-mail, thanking me for doing so.

As it turned out, my presence in Paris was not required that autumn, or at any time in the future. Nevertheless, I continued to follow Petite Anglaise, which became a regular "appointment" read at around the time that its content shifted from the observational to the more directly personal.

One Saturday afternoon in September 2005, Petite and I found ourselves at the same gathering of British bloggers, at a London pub. As bloggers' gatherings go, this was a slightly strange one, characterised by the unusually high levels of nervousness in the room. This nervousness certainly extended to me; although usually adept at living up to the blog persona, I found this one to be something of a struggle. (The hangover didn't help, either.)

I may have been wrong - and we'd never met, so how could I judge? - but I thought that Petite was finding it slightly heavy going as well. She was certainly quieter and more self-contained than I was expecting, and I couldn't help but sense a certain aloofness. It was probably just the natural self-defence mechanism of an equally and understandably nervous soul, but once again I felt a certain disappointment, that our long-postponed and (for my part) happily presumed Great Friendship hadn't kicked in after all. But then, as her book both explains and explores, there is a difference between Catherine Sanderson and "petite anglaise" - just as there is a difference between Mike Atkinson and "troubled diva", and between many other personal bloggers and their online alter egos.

At the same gathering, I got talking to a feisty and disarmingly frank Mexican woman, who had just landed in the UK and who was planning to spend the remainder of her visit with an unnamed British lover. ("I'm sorry, I cannot tell you anything about him!" "I am hoping to have a lot of sex!") I only found out much later that the mystery lover was another British blogger, that the pair had met via each others' blogs, and that at the end of her visit, they eloped back to Mexico together, each abandoning their spouses in order to start a new life.

The British blogger announced this by leaving a note out for his wife and children, which was only found after his disappearance. The shockwaves reverberated around certain sections of UK blogland for weeks. The abandoned wife even started a blog of her own. For those who didn't know them, it was pure soap opera: compelling, car-crash stuff. Who knew that the simple act of maintaining a personal blog could have such dramatic consequences?

The next time I met Petite - or Catherine, or Cath, as our mutual friends called her - it was a year later, at another London bloggers' gathering, organised by the same blogpal as before. By this time (Autumn 2006) several members of this particular group had started landing paid writing gigs on the strength of their blogs, and so there was a certain heady excitement in the air, and much talk of that shiny new Holy Grail, the (squeak!) Book Deal. Gone was the nervousness of the previous year, to be replaced by a new-found self-confidence, and a sense that something pretty cool was happening. Perhaps it was the one, symbolic, and never quite repeated public manifestation of our little gang's moment in the sun.

Whatever it was (and whatever it might have looked like to anyone reading about it afterwards), it was a supremely happy afternoon - even if it did leave one first-generation blogger (who had been somewhat bemused to be asked, by one bright young thing working the room, "So, what is your blog about?") commenting that she "felt like a Betamax in a room full of DVDs".

Cath and I chatted a lot more easily on that occasion, and again at a mutual friend's birthday party the following Spring (which also marked a sudden, awful flash of realisation on my part, that maybe, just maybe, I had started to take the Eurovision Song Contest just a little bit too seriously for my own good, but let's not digress all night). Aloof? God, where did I get that idea from? And how had I failed to spot that wry, understated, engagingly naughty (and sometimes downright filthy) sense of humour?

A few months later, we met each other at another mutual friend's house, where - having, shall we say, mis-calculated and over-indulged - I committed one of my worst gaffes in living memory, telling our hostess that her delicious home-cooked chocolate dessert was so good that "I thought you'd got it from Marks and Spencers!" From that point onwards, my memories of the evening are hazy to non-existent - apart from one moment where, vaguely conscious that I had laughed a little too loud and a little too long at some minor witticism, I thought I caught a slight but telling frown of baffled alarm.

On all of these occasions, our encounters were quite out of context with the life that Cath describes on her blog, and now in her book. Mr Frog (the father of her child), Tadpole (the daughter herself, whose singular charisma bursts from the page, making her perhaps the book's true star), James from Rennes (the blog reader turned lover, and catalyst for the break-up with Mr Frog), the Boy (the lover recently turned fiancé)... all these key figures in her life remain as abstract constructs, and no more known to me than to any of her thousands of readers.

None the less, I count her as a good, trusty blogpal. We chat from time to time (when she told me that she "had kittens" in Richard and Judy's dressing room, I took her quite literally, assuming that Channel 4 had acceded to some strange diva demand); our respective sites have wafted on and off each other's blogrolls over the years; and she was an immense help to the Shaggy Blog Stories endeavour, readily and willingly giving up many hours of her time to help assess the submissions.

So, yes, the first thing you should know is that my opinion of Petite Anglaise is a partial one. I've been looking forward to reading it ever since I first heard of the (squeak!) Book Deal, back in 2006 - and I'm happy to report that not only does it live up to my expectations, but that it vastly exceeds them.

Tomorrow, I might even getting around to telling you why.

To be continued.

Labels: blogs, books, petite anglaise