Every time Stephanie Theobald comes back to Paris, she gets a laugh out of French men and their pick-up lines. “No one will come up to you in England and say ‘Ooh you’re so sensual when you eat ice cream!’” she says with a giggle. Another of her favorites is “Ça va ma biche?,” a more poetic version of “hello gorgeous.” She likes that one so much that she used it as the title for her first novel.
“Biche” is loosely based on the diary Theobald kept while she was living in Paris in the early ’90s. It’s the story of 22-year-old bisexual George, a recent graduate who is desperately trying to make it as a journalist, ideally as editor of the International Herald Tribune. In the meantime she is barely making ends meet freelancing, and shares a squalid apartment in Barbès with two girlfriends. They live on lentils and vodka, and their furniture is all handmade or found in the street.
George and her best friend Holly, a gay would-be fashion designer, are addicted to one-night stands. They spend their lives gatecrashing parties, from designer shows to culture ministry soirées. When their fairly pathetic attempts at networking fail, they latch on to someone and head for the sack.
George sleeps with an impressive number of people, of both sexes: a nerdy proofreader, a Californian “valley girl,” a buck-toothed African who just happens to be bicycling by. Other people go for beauty, but George is attracted by the quirks. She picks up one guy because of his pin-stripe suit, and a ridiculously fat bouncer at Le Palace because she’s always wondered what it would be like with a sumo wrestler.
Sex is hard to write about. But Theobald recounts all the juicy details with a surprising tenderness. The proofreader is impotent, and keeps raging about the peace talks in Israel. With his clothes off, the sumo wrestler looks like “a grotesque baby waiting to be changed.” And the “pin-strip” man does a naked circus trick that would make the Marquis de Sade proud; he’s “Casanova as a performing seal.” Then one day George meets someone who matters, and the rules to the game change.
“Biche” is raunchy and often very funny. But under its brash exterior is a serious novel based on real experience. Some of the best bits are the descriptions of the seedy part of Paris that tourists never visit. George lives “where the little old ladies and their poodles end, and the crippled beggars and butchers’ shops selling sheep’s heads begin.” There are no judgements: George relishes the rebellion of squalor. I kept thinking of Henry Miller.
Compared to London, Theobald thinks Paris is a sleepy, old-fashioned town. She is shocked by the French idea of a Saturday night on the town, “sitting on a terrasse drinking something in a nice-colored glass, then queuing up at the cinema to see some nice film about love. It's all so sedate.”
Theobald worked as a fashion writer and editor for many years, at Paris Passion (thinly disguised as Paris Parade in “Biche”) and later at The European. “Journalism is fun,” she says, “and very instant, and you can get some cute one-liners in.” But writing a novel is another thing altogether. She thinks that a lot of current British fiction, the so-called “chick-lit” à la Bridget Jones, is little more than journalism. “It’s all about ‘my bum’s really fat, I need to get a boyfriend!’” she jokes. “I think you need to let it mull around a bit more before you can call it literature.”