It’s early in the day, and the skin around his eyes is still blowsy with sleep. “You can’t try to write a bestseller,” says Tony Parsons. “It surprised me all along. It surprises me still.”
Two years ago, Parsons published Man and Boy, the story of a 29-year-old TV producer who explodes his marriage with a one-night stand and is left by his wife to bring up their young son alone. It started selling and has never stopped. In the time that it takes him to pour a glass of orange juice and fill a bowl with cereal and fruit, I estimate that six more copies have been sold somewhere in the world. In the past few months alone he has signed two million-dollar deals, one with the film company Miramax and one with the publisher Simon & Schuster for the United States paperback rights.
His new book, One for My Baby (HarperCollins), is just out. The bandwagon rolls on, Tony atop. “If I’d left One for My Baby until now I don’t think I’d write it, because it would be too intimidating.” For all the bluster about transatlantic bidding wars, he seems a little wary of all this glitter. He is richer, of course, but says it hasn’t made a difference to the daily economics of life. And his ego?
“It sounds disingenuous, but if anything I’m a bit more humble now. You realise that the goodwill is for that book; it’s not for me as a human being or what I’ve done over the last 25 years. It’s not necessarily the best book around that sells a million; it’s just the book that people respond to.”
Is Tony Parsons for real? The question of authenticity, or lack of it, is the key to Parsons’ persona. From his early blaze as a punk chronicler on the New Musical Express (where he met Julie Burchill, whom he married), via his tenure as a tabloid controversialist, to his recent framing as a barrow-boy boffin on BBC2’s Late Review, Parsons has always been received with the suspicion that he may be milking it too much, pushing it too far. And rightly so — expert as he is at producing well-turned phrases and gutting put-downs, which, incidentally, expose his own insecurities in the same moment as they reach their target’s jugular.
Thus “older feminists” who criticised Man and Boy were “a generation older than any woman I’ve ever been out with”. Nor has he much sympathy for the commitment-phobia of contemporary male fiction because “I’ve always had a woman in my life, one woman at least.”
And Parsons is, admittedly, a dream date: warm, funny, sexy in the way that people are when they know themselves well. He’s charming, and a wee bit dangerous. He has a “terrible temper”, but talks tenderly of his dappled early years in Essex, as the only child of a school dinner lady and a decorated World War II commando, and is both articulate and outrageously sentimental about family. Every day he tries to walk in the footsteps of his father, who died of lung cancer in 1987; a man who was “strong enough to be gentle” — “he’d carry a fly out to the garden but I’d try to swat it”.
Best of all, he’s a single father who brought up his son Robert, now 21, after his marriage to Burchill ended (due to Parsons’ infidelity). He even admits that single fathers have it easier than single mothers. “One thing I always try to correct is the idea that I brought up my son alone. My parents were incredible, [as was] the women that I was involved with, Yuriko, my wife.”
And he adores his boy. Too good to be true? Ladies, I’d ask you to form an orderly queue, but — you heard the man — he’s already taken. In another sense, he’s also a dream date for New Labour. “I’m a rightwing maniac, materialistic, xenophobic … New Labour basically,” he deadpans.
He will ever be the working-class boy done good. But though he is often accused of exploiting his working-class credentials, today he says that he feels more at home in Tokyo than he does in Essex.
The plot of One for My Baby is no less lovable than that of Man and Boy. After the untimely death of his wife, Alfie Budd devotes himself to a string of meaningless affairs with the young students at his foreign-language school, until a single mum from Essex who believes that we get more than one chance at happiness begins lessons and … you can guess the rest. It also fictionalises the death of his mother, who died of cancer two years ago.
As in the previous novel, Parsons is a convincing honest broker, telling it straight about life, love and men’s capacity for crap behaviour. I suggest that women like his writing because they feel they’re getting the truth about men. He’s not convinced: “I thought that Harry [the protagonist of Man and Boy] would be too much of a real man for women readers, in the sense that he’s unfaithful to his wife, he’s not a great father and, although he’s got good intentions, he’s fallible.”
Parsons can play the innocent a little too strictly on occasion. He tells me later that women are a mystery to him. I think this is a bit of a fib. Parsons knows full well that an unfaithful, fallible type with good intentions is exactly what women are looking for — he’s only like that because he’s not with me, stupid. And, similarly, he must know that the yearning for family — both past and future — that informs his work is desperately appealing. He’s a critic, for goodness sake.
“I tend to get stick from left, liberal quarters because they see it as back to basics. It’s not that. I can speak with a degree of authority on most kinds of families, and I think that the great beneficiaries [of the traditional family] were children. It programmed me for success. I never doubted that I was loved by my parents and that does give you a strong basis for life. I’ve made a lot of mistakes and it’s right, if you’ve had the kind of life I’ve had, that you should think, ‘How has that affected my child?'”
His son’s generation is incredibly wary of marriage and commitment, he says. Which may be no bad thing, given men’s perennial obsession with starting afresh on a new romantic path. “But men can feel that, and also feel a need for family and stability. The problem is that you can’t have both.”
It’s funny, I say, that for women “having it all” is about the realities of family and career, while for men it’s about two conflicting dreams. “Having it all for women is a balancing act. It’s difficult, but it’s not impossible. For men [having it all] is impossible.”
So what does he see when he looks at how his own romantic life has affected his son? “It’s the great regret of my life that he lost contact with his mother.” Robert enjoyed a brief reunion with his mother after his 17th birthday, but the relationship has since broken down again. Burchill’s regular digs at Parsons in print are beside the point, he adds. “I couldn’t give a fuck about what she says about me. It’s not some little media feud to me. It’s someone that I was married to, didn’t work out, happens every day, unfortunate. But we had a child together and she’s had no contact with the child. The idea that I would care about what she thinks about my professional life just doesn’t come up.”
But even this restrained response will almost inevitably be picked over by his ex-wife. “I understand what you’re saying, but what else can I do other than answer your questions honestly? So what if this piece inspires her to write a hatchet job or 10? My concern is the happiness of our son.”
And then you wonder what it’s like for Robert to have his damage, his motherless state, laid out like this. Writing, says Parsons, is how he makes sense of the world. “It’s also how I support myself and the people that I love. It’s the one thing I’ve tried that I’m really good at.”
When Parsons’ mother died, he wrote about her in his newspaper column. She died on a Friday, he wrote it on the Saturday and it was printed on the Monday. Even now, he gets stopped in the street about it. “People said it was a really brave piece of writing, but if anything it was quite cowardly because it gave me an excuse to cry.”
Although he harbours no ache for high literary esteem, he won’t position himself as self-consciously mainstream. Part of Alfie’s spiritual rehabilitation involves learning a martial art. “If I was horribly middlebrow, you wouldn’t put t’ai chi in a book, because it’s a bit too New Agey, a bit too alternative. But I’m interested in it.”
It’s rather lovely that nowadays Parsons considers writing about t’ai chi to be edgy.