EYES RIGHT...VOTE IN MY POLL
Salut! can hardly claim her as its own. It was not even born when the idea first took shape.
But for all the upheaval in my own life, I cannot suppress feelings of smug excitement at the gathering interest in Petite Anglaise's forthcoming book launch.
Like the girl in the Human League's Don't You Want Me Baby?, Petite - more properly known as Catherine Sanderson - always knew she'd find a much better place, either with or without me.
It is just that things moved rather faster for Catherine than would have been the case had I not broken the news of her summary dismissal, by an English firm of accountants with offices in Paris. The story swept the world, propelling Petite from popular cult blogger to serious player in mainstream non-fiction.
And just for a spot of fun, use the Salut! Soundings poll to your right to let me know where you stand on the great debate: who got the book cover right, the Americans or the British?That's the US version at the top of this posting. Buy it in the UK and it will look like this.
Catherine's book - exquisitely titled Petite Anglaise: In Paris, In Love, In Trouble - comes out in Britain in late February, in America next summer. I have no commercial interest, beyond the fact that you can pre-order it here.
Make up your own minds. But I think the American publishers are streets, even boulevards, ahead of their UK counterparts in capturing the essence of the Catherine Sanderson/Petite Anglaise story: the thirtysomething English girl in Paris, falling in love with and then splitting from her French lover Mr Frog, the father of their daughter Tadpole.
That does not mean the book will fail to sell on both sides of the Atlantic and far beyond. I am not even saying the British cover is rubbish, just that the Americans got theirs absolutely and brilliantly right. Over at Catherine's blog, someone denounced it as sexist, which seemed so prissy that my own preference was reinforced.
Bill Taylor, though he was then "James Hamilton", posed the question a year ago, and probably still harbours the doubts that inspired it. By the time the book appears, he mused, won't Petite Anglaise have "long since fallen back into obscurity"?
I think not. The world's obsession with internet culture has hardly come to an end. And the book's publication will be accompanied by a burst of renewed attention. Catherine will be all over the papers and magazines, and popping up in daytime and evening TV studios. Someone will buy the rights to extracts; one or two others who miss out will dig into the cuttings, and Petite's own archive, and publish "spoilers".
Without having read a word of the book, I feel sufficiently familiar with the subject matter and the author's style to predict that it will be a success.
And I still think it would make a cracking film, crowned by the potentially hilarious sacking scene. Others can nominate the actor to play the exaggeratedly stuffy boss in braces, portrait of the Queen on the wall behind him, giving marching orders to the blogging bilingual sec.
Catherine, from memory - flawed memory, says she (see Comments) - rather fancies the idea of Gwyneth Paltrow as the cowering slip of a girl left shellshocked after being fired but later winning £30,000 in her French labour court claim.If I am right, or even half right, in my upbeat forecasts, Catherine can fly me back to Paris for our much-delayed lunch date.
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