BABE FRIENDLY

Tony Parsons examines the extraordinary

appeal to the opposite sex of his novel Man and Boy, which he conceived as a guy book

YOU know that novel you have inside you? Well, if you have even the slightest ambition to see it riding high on the bestseller list, then there is one thing you need to know. You can't do it without the women.

In 1999 women accounted for about two thirds of all purchases of fiction and spent £134 million more than men on books. The bestseller list is a private fief- dom, created — and mostly populated — by women. You will never be given a visa to that fiefdom unless your book pushes those tender female buttons. It's true that you can have a respectable little literary career. You can get the reviewers purring, have Lynn Barber hanging on your every word, do the round of literary festivals. But without the women you will never be a truly popular novelist. Without the women you will always be an unpopular novelist.

Throughout the two years it took to write, I honestly believed that Man and Boy was a guy book. The story of an unfaithful man who brings up his small son alone while resolving his relationship with his dying father — how could that be anything other than a guy book? I can remember Nick Sayers, my editor and mastermind at HarperCollins, saying that we had to work out a way of avoiding hav- ing too many male faces on the cover (which is how we came to have that heart- rending image — designed by a woman, of course — of a man's boots and a child's trainers).

But, as Man and Boy marches towards the half-million mark, I can see now that it is not a guy book at all. The distinguish- ing feature of any guy book — whether it is by an ex-member of the SAS, a former business associate of the Krays, or an acolyte of Martin Amis — is that it has zero emotional content. Guy books abstain from emotion. I remember an early meeting at HarperCollins with Big David North, the head of sales, where I said that I wanted my book to provoke the kind of reaction that Love Story enjoyed in the Odeons of the early Seventies. So I was making eyes at the female audience before I even knew it.

Man and Boy sold 6,000 copies last week, four months after publication. This is more than gratifying. It is genuinely humbling. Every day I open my mail and think: you like me, you really like me. I can't give you a gender breakdown behind those sales figures. But I know that about 95 per cent of the letters I receive about the book are from women, my events are largely attended by women, and, if some- one approaches me in a bookshop, it is invariably a woman. Here are some sample letters, all from women:

I have never cried so much as I did reading your book. Sometimes I hate it for making me suffer so much and so intensely. I have to thank you for giving me the opportunity to feel such strong emotions.

Your book made me want to stay awake reading all night because I couldn't bear the thought of setting it down for eight hours for something as trivial as sleeping. Your book has touched me, moved me, in a way that hundreds of other books haven't even come close to.

I wish I could be blasé about these let- ters, but I can't. Professionally, they are the best thing that has ever happened to me. They make me feel as though I have done something right.

I only began to realise that I had written a woman's book when I was mobbed by shy Irish housewives in Eason's, the big book- shop on O'Connell Street in Dublin. 'Tony,' observed Bert, the manager of Eason's, 'the book you've written is very babe-friendly.' Babe-friendly? How did this happen?

I thought that women would be turned off by the book's inciting incident: Harry, the protagonist, has a one-night stand with a colleague from work. His wife finds out and then walks out, leaving him saddled with their small son. But apparently there are things in Man and Boy that allow female readers to absolve Harry: his sense of guilt over his infidelity, his wretched- ness at losing his wife, his disappointment in himself for not keeping his wedding vows and, above all, his love for his young son.

Throughout the writing and editing pro- cess I had guidance from Nick Sayers at HarperCollins and Caradoc King at my agents, A.P. Watt. There were countless discussions about every theme, every chapter, every line. We made sure that each and every scene in the book was played in exactly the right key. A lot of people read Man and Boy in one or two sittings. That's not accidental. A book is only that readable if the writer is prepared to turn in draft after draft after draft.

Both Caradoc and Nick were always worried about alienating women readers. My agent and my publisher were always adamant that Harry's wife Gina should be as sympathetic a figure as possible, even when she walks out and saddles Harry with their kid. And, of course, Gina is based on a real woman. But not the real woman that most people expected. There's not one gram of my first wife, Julie Burchill, in the book.

I never wanted Man and Boy to be a lit- tle roman-a -clef. If I was going to work on this book for two years, I had higher aspi- rations for it than that. And yet there is no doubt that I plundered my own life for the emotions in Man and Boy, and that's one of the reasons why it has so much emo- tional clout — I know my way around a cancer ward and a divorce court.

But right from the start I knew that didn't want a character in the book based on Julie. I left her out because we split up 16 years ago. Believe me, there have been a lot of love and tears since then. For too long Julie and I have been a kind of Punch and Judy show for the chattering classes. By leaving her out of Man and Boy, I felt I was saying, Punch has quit. I also felt that leaving Julie out was open- ing up the book to a mass market. I always wanted Man and Boy to sell more than copies of the Guardian.

Both Caradoc and Nick, who have a rough idea of what is real in Man and Boy and what is invented, were content for me to leave Julie out, because it gave them a chance to make Harry's wife more saint- like. Gina is a very sympathetic character. That's partly because my editor and agent urged me to heighten Gina's decency and goodness, but it's also because Gina is based on a very sympathetic woman. My advisers only got me to enhance what was already there.

I can see now that Man and Boy always keeps women on its side. Although the wife leaves, she always plans to come back for her child. Although Harry has a one-night stand, he sleeps with a nice girl and not a cheap tart. And he never feels good about himself; he is always agonis- ing about his inadequacies as a lover, a son, a father. The Hamlet of Sainsbury's, he fucks around, but then he feels bad about it. 'Leg or breast?'

Sample letter from this morning's mail:

have now bought ten more copies of Man and Boy to give to my friends and if they don't enjoy it I will be crossing them out of my address book.

No man is that passionate about a book. Would a man cross someone off his Christ- mas list for failing to appreciate the descrip- tion of the destruction of the German Sixth Army in Antony Beevor's Stalingrad? I do not kid myself. There is no guaran- tee that I will ever again write anything that women will love quite as much as Man and Boy. For the second law of best- sellerdorn is as follows: nobody knows anything.

Most of the books that desperately try to ingratiate themselves with women get it completely wrong. They have those awful pastel-coloured covers, adorably useless men and only one thing on their mind — commitment. That's not what women get from Man and Boy. In the end, this is a book about the realities of modern family life, which probably appeals to women a lot more than all those drippy, pastel- coloured covers.

Another letter from a woman:

The book was so honest and touching and universal — it made mc feel the gender gap was perhaps not so wide after all.

That 'universal' thing — I reckon that's the real reason why Man and Boy has become such a bestseller. We all go through more or less the same things in our lives. Getting older, seeing our par- ents becoming frail and ill, struggling to hold a marriage together, watching our children grow, learning that there are things in this world you will never protect them from. Do women like that sort of thing? In the end it doesn't matter much if you are a woman or a man. We all have big dreams for our babies.