When Catherine Sanderson started blogging about her expat life in Paris, she had no idea it would catapult her into the international limelight and land her a six-figure publishing deal. She talks to Emma Bird.
“Lots of people email me and say ‘you’re living my dream’,” says Catherine Sanderson breezily, down the phone line from Paris.
With a two-book deal worth £450,000 with publishing giant Penguin and a rumoured film about her life in the offing, it’s not difficult to see why. These days the 35-year-old, originally from Yorkshire, has turned her back on her former life as a bilingual secretary for British accountancy firm Dixon Wilson, which has offices in the French capital. She now spends her days writing in the studio she rents near her apartment in the vibrant working class neighbourhood Belleville where she has lived for the past 13 years.
The reason for our call is her memoir Petite Anglaise: in Paris. In Love. In Trouble, but anyone listening in would be forgiven for thinking it was a girly catch up with between friends. We cover university (we both did the same language degree at Bath and had some of the same lecturers), living in Paris (I was there, albeit briefly, at the same time as her), French men and how we both fell in love with France during our first-ever French lesson at school.
Having followed her blog www.petiteanglaise.com and read the book, I know all about her sex life, Mr Frog (her former French partner and father of her four-year-old daughter Tadpole) and her day-to-day life in Paris. In short, it feels like I’ve known her forever. But, of course, I haven’t. I haven’t even met her.
It’s as if Catherine, who moved to Paris right after graduating in French and German with European Studies in 1995 to take up a post as a teaching assistant, was always destined for fame. In 2005, she started blogging under the pseudonym Petite Anglaise.
“The day I created my anonymous Internet diary, the nom de plume ‘petite anglaise’ instinctively sprang to mind,” recalls Catherine. “Those two words summed up neatly everything I ever wanted my life to be. Petite anglaise: an English girl who has been translated into French.
“I liked the idea of a nom de plume, not because I had anything to hide but because it seemed to be an unwritten rule of the game. It would be a harmless hobby. Little did I know that I had just unleashed a force, which, within less than a year, would turn my life, and the lives of those dearest to me, inside out.”
Indeed, when the Guardian mentioned the blog a month after Catherine’s first post, the readerships swelled from around five to 200 a day. In 2004, it was nominated for a Bloggie in the best new weblog category and in 2005 best blog in the European section. But it was only in April the following year when her blogging really thrust her into the international limelight: her employers fired her for publicly disgracing them online. Up to then, around 3,000 people were reading her blog each day. On the day the news broke, more than 40,000 clicked on to find out what the furor was all about.
“When it happened, I was so, so dismayed,” says Catherine of the day she was suspended. “I thought I deserved a telling off at best. I had lots of backing from readers, including French ones who got behind me and said ‘we can’t let this happen to Petite Anglaise’. I decided to take it to tribunal.”
Dixon Wilson was ordered to award Catherine €44,000 in compensation, equivalent to her annual gross salary, along with €500 legal fees. They also had to reimburse the French benefits office the equivalent of six months’ wages.
“I think if my employers had been French, the employment tribunal might have viewed it differently. In this case, I think they were probably slightly worse disposed towards my employers because they were British. When I won the case, I burst into tears. Even though I had moved on with my life by then, I realised how much it still mattered to me.”
Read the full article in our September 2008 edition.
