Angela Corrias interviews author and illustrator Posy Simmonds at Dulwich Picture Gallery
The first thing you notice about Posy Simmonds is that her eyes don’t stop smiling. No matter what you ask or tell her, you will have the impression she’s not taking you seriously. It’s when you start delving into her books that her direct simplicity comes to light. Despite her popularity, she has the enthusiasm of a beginner.
Sipping from a glass of white wine, in the café of Dulwich Picture Gallery, just before a lecture she was going to hold, she starts recalling her French times: “I know France and I like it very much, the people, the language, the literature. I did a course at the Sorbonne in Paris and I like to come back often [It's a] beautiful city”.
Posy Simmonds is famous for her satirical cartoon strip on an English middle-class couple, George and Wendy Weber. She also published many illustrated novels, both for children, such as Lulu and the Flying Babies and Fred, and for adults, including Gemma Bovery and Tamara Drewe, released in 2007.
I would have bet that her book Gemma Bovery had been inspired directly by Flaubert’s Madame Bovary: “No, curiously, I got the inspiration for Gemma Bovery when I was in Italy. I was sitting in a café in Pisa with an Italian friend and we had in front of us a woman; she was wearing Prada and plenty of bags from shopping.
And she looked so bored! She treated her lover so badly, she was very mean with him.
Immediately my friend told me: ‘Look, doesn’t she seem like Madame Bovary?’” Her native satiric wit came immediately to light that morning in Pisa and the idea for Gemma Bovery was already in the air: “I really meant to be ironic. That woman gave me the inspiration for a satiric novel about English people”.
Her stay in France, even if it was many years ago, is still vivid in her memory. “It was an unforgettable experience, maybe because it was my first time out of the country and completely alone, the very first time without my family”. Her French experience started in a “banlieue” of Paris in a weird family whose anedoctes still make her laugh. She then moved to more central accommodation and started living and absorbing French culture and lifestyle. “During the course I met people from every nationality, American, Italian, and every walk of life, few French actually because it was a course for foreigners”.
At my question “What did you miss of England when you were in France?”, her answer is prompt: “The first thing I missed is that at the beginning I couldn’t speak French very well and because of that lack of confidence I couldn’t make jokes! I also missed the way English people are not afraid of making fool of themselves, they don’t mind looking stupid, unlike Italian people who care about their ‘bella figura’, or French who rather like being admired. What I liked in France is that there was much more discussion, a very stimulating environment”. Actually you can recognize in Posy a kind of French attitude, elegance and charm, perfectly matching a witty sense of humor that even has her showing customers of the café the new steps she had learnt in tap class.
Posy’s passion has always been art, but since the beginning knew that she didn’t want her career to be in fine arts: “I have always liked drawing, I’ve been drawing since I was very young. And I love writing too”. Mixing children and adults literature doesn’t seem to scare her, she naturally considers children’s books as complicated as adults’:
“You know, children are very demanding, they like ‘strange words’, nothing naughty, of course. And the story must be as articulated as the ones for adults, I think children like something true. I use of course different characters, I wouldn’t have drunk people in a book for kids!”
It’s not without a sarcastic smile that she remembers the comments following the release of Gemma Bovery in France: “They kept wondering, it’s not a ‘bande dessinée’, it’s not a classical novel, but what is it?” And with a Gallic shrug she whispers in a perfect French accent: «C’est un roman illustré!»
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