Notes from the author

IT WAS SCRIPTURE and I huddled over the Holy Book with my neighbour Rebecca who was silently convulsing as she covertly read the Song of Solomon, pointing towards the word ‘breast’. We were eight. It was not the adult world of breasts that held me rapt, it was the sureness and utter determination of love.

‘Many waters cannot quench love, neither can the floods drown it.’ Our scripture teacher, blind to the transformation taking place in my own little breast, boomed in her finest Jean Brodie, ‘What exactly is so funny?’ and back it was to parables. Nothing was funny. I had been swept into a romance of epic proportion and reading something that seemed both incredibly adult and eons away struck me with indignation.

I had very strong feelings for the boy who played Oliver Twist but even at the age of eight I could not confuse these with love. I just wanted to feed him gruel and tuck him into bed. I should have to wait years and years for this great grand grown-up thing and the thought made me churlish and grumpy.

I began my book The Man With the Dancing Eyes on a rare warm London day, with a less scanty experience of romantic love but none the wiser to the whole business really. On the telephone, and distractedly drawing a picture of a girl packing feverishly. I wrote underneath, ‘She packed up her bags and left in a flurry post the demise of her tragic affair.’

My drawing was (and is) dreadful but, over the next few days, thoughts and sentences of Pierre the heroine flew forth. She had a passion for shoes and was hot-footing it away from a cad who had broken her heart. This much I knew. On the day I left to fly home to New York I called Annie Morris a brilliant artist and friend since childhood. I knew she was the only person to draw Pierre. I also knew that, under the guise of getting her to draw Pierre, she would come to New York where we could have long leisurely breakfasts at Balthazar and lazily trawl the Chelsea flea market. This we did and she did also draw Pierre — magnificently.

As we went on I discovered things about my characters: Blue, Pierre’s landlady, had a peppery Sobranie-tinged voice, a tendency towards dispensing bad advice, enormous bosoms and fine ankles. Annie’s drawings helped me see her and her vision of Blue makes me howl with laughter whenever I look at it.

The lovely thing about writing the book was that I knew it wasn’t going to be a novel. It is (I hope) the sort of self indulgent book you can read on a melancholic Sunday afternoon swaddled in blankets. The tricky thing about it was that things that were occurring in my life played havoc with the fates of my characters. I struggled with potential recriminations. Was I condemning Pierre to a life of misery if I allowed the man with the dancing eyes to waltz back in and sweep her off her feet having behaved so shoddily? Should she marry a bullfighter from Seville or no one at all?

Yet my innate romanticism prevailed and, although daily I thought up nasty plots and schemes to make him more miserable, around April I cracked. Perhaps it was the New York spring that thawed my frosty pen or perhaps my friend David whose kitchen table I wrote the book upon. He was vociferous on the topic.

‘How dare she,’ he said banging his fist on the aforementioned table. ‘How dare she run off to New York without telling him where she’s going. I think she’s a terrible woman and I’m going upstairs.’

‘But David, he committed an indiscretion that tore her in two, he has behaved very badly,’ I said primly.

‘Pah’ he stalked upstairs beadily.

I would not let him read my book for some time after this.

Eventually I relented.

‘She’s quite a tough little character that Pierre.’

‘Hmmm,’ I said guardedly.

‘She looks quite like you.’

‘A bit — maybe,’ I allowed tersely.

He paused and started to laugh. ‘I’m glad she takes him back.’

So am I. I wanted to write a fairytale replete with happy ending. There are far too few around these days, both fairytales and happy endings. Yet despite these often confusing, chaotic times, I still have a (perhaps childish) belief in both.


© Sophie Dahl