After the publishers read the manuscript of my wife’s book, they had one request: “Expand the husband character. He’s hilarious.” My wife was surprised but she complied, and as a result her French Children Don’t Throw Food became a bestseller in the UK and is now bopping an unsuspecting American public over the head as Bringing Up Bébé. Many reviewers have described it as a guide to French parenting. In fact, it’s something more interesting than that: it’s a portrait of me.
I had been immortalised in literature before – Paddy Agnew sets up his book on Italian football with a pompous remark by me, which he then rebuts at great length – but only now have I joined the select group of people who are better known as literary characters. I will forever be bracketed with the minor 19th-century critic Leigh Hunt, who is remembered only as the model for the ridiculous Skimpole in Dickens’s Bleak House.
This is a more common fate than you might think. I was once contacted by an economist who introduced himself as the model for a character in a Zadie Smith novel. Based on the couple of novelists I know, I have developed a theory of the novel that says that writers just write down what happened to them, and sometimes change somebody’s name. But now that I have been turned into a major literary character myself, I don’t want to be one. My wife’s portrayal of me may be factually correct, but facts cannot capture such a subtle and complex figure. The “Simon” in the book lacks the appeal of the actual me.