Why I Wrote Duch

How did I come to write a novel about a sixtysomething Princess Diana being found alive in Paris? To be honest, she never particularly interested me during her lifetime, but her shocking death was an emotionally transformative event in the UK. I wasn’t there at that moment, observing the hysteria from the US (which was to have its own emotional rupture four years later on 9/11).

As a longtime Londoner (before and since) I was taken aback by the response to her death, when all the indignities she’d suffered at the hands of the media and royal family were brought into sudden, stark relief.

That interested me, as did the story of Anna Anderson, a troubled woman who jumped from a bridge into a canal in Berlin in February 1920. When she was pulled out, she began claiming that she was actually the Grand Duchess Anastasia, youngest daughter of the Russian Tsar, who had somehow escaped the family’s assassination in Yekaterinburg two years earlier.

The two events melded in my mind, and I began writing the story — as a film. Duch began life as a screenplay, and I got about 20 minutes in when I realized it made no sense in that form; I’d written other screenplays that I hadn’t managed to get anyone to read. Better to write it as a novel, and if anyone wanted to turn the story into a movie (its natural delivery system), that was fine with me.

But I wanted to write it really as a film in novel form. Its terse, present-tense sequences are meant to unfurl like a movie in a reader’s mind. I wanted the story to happen in a fixed period (three weeks) in a propulsive manner.

I read a lot of books on Princess Diana and spent several weeks in Paris researching the locations — a working holiday if there ever was one. Next to London and New York, Paris is my favorite city, and Fox’s apartment in the book is essentially the one I stayed in on Blvd. St-Germain on the Left Bank.

I think of the book as really being about Celebrity Derangement Syndrome. The hysteria that brought the crowds out to collectively mourn a much-loved figure like Diana was healing and cathartic. But that same kind of hysteria elected a failed property developer and game-show host President of the United States two decades later.

Duch’s instant following, her huge rallies and pored-over statements, would have been unbelievable a generation ago. Now it feels all too credible. Progressive populism and right-wing demagoguery are two sides of the same coin if they cause people to blindly follow a person they really know little about.

I have the greatest respect for Princess Diana, and my regard for her only grew the more I looked into her sadly curtailed life. Her loss was no greater felt than by her two sons, the younger of whom liked to imagine his mother still alive and living in Paris.

Perhaps she isn’t actually still walking amongst us. But as Hemingway wrote at the end of The Sun Also Rises, isn’t it pretty to think so?