- I wrote this book about my life in France because I realised that despite the fact that I had been homesick for 25 years I was still there and I wanted to understand why.
- I wrote this book as a proper analysis of the French world-view because I was sick of reading so much of the inaccurate drivel that is basically designed to bolster all the old myths and prejudices about our closest neighbour and ultimately prevent us from looking at our own flaws.
- I wrote this book because I think France is our alter ego and if we can understand her we can understand ourselves.
- I wrote it because I knew that I would have a laugh in the process.
- I wrote it because my publishers asked me to and were offering me three times more than they had for any of my novels.
(Answer: All of them)
The Secret Life of France 
Having lived in France for nearly six years now, I’ve discovered that the French like to lump the Brits and the Yanks together as ‘Anglo Saxons’ (especially when they want to be derogatory) and yet I feel that many British people have closer affinities with our European neighbours than they do with our trans-Atlantic ‘cousins’. Have you, Lucy Wadham, ‘gone native’ after living for so many years in France (from a relatively early age) and therefore adopted this generalised (and I think remarkably lazy!) collective term for English-speaking people even when the British and North Americans are famously separated rather than united by their common language and appear to me (having also spent some time living in America) to have very different attitudes to life and motivations for living. Your Protestant versus Catholic argument doesn’t cut it for me!
Actually Lucy I have thought about doing the same thing on the other side , may I say, from the England side, all this drivel said perpetually about French people are like this and like that by the vast majority who have never been to France or even lived in France. I could say a lot of things about the British habits and mannerisms in public but refrain to do so!
Point 5 ofcourse – it’s the most sensible reason and I’ll bet her dad would have taught her that.
You’re right. That statement is perplexing. What I mean is that France is, in so many ways, our opposite, when it comes to our respective attitudes towards life’s fundamentals: sex, money, work, marriage, pleasure. Her value system is different from ours and I believe that the rift between us, although it began earlier, was compounded when France, seriously tempted by the Reformation, chose to remain Catholic. To simplify, her values are, culturally-speaking, Catholic values and ours are Protestant. But, like Ann Elk, I have a theory on this subject…Which is mine. Which I have. But you’ll have to read the book if you want to find out what – exactly – this theory is.
Hum, I’m quite perplexed with the 3rd statement…
And I can’t wait to read your book!!