Influences? Plenty, throughout my life, but when it came to writing French Sally, it went where it wanted to go. Right at the start - this was back in 1985 - there was, perhaps, Georges Perec - La Vie Mode d'Emploi, with its many characters coming and going in a block of flats in Paris. I lived at the time in the west of France, in a street first scheduled for demolition in 1928. When the threat became real and the bulldozers arrived, it gave me the spark for French Sally: you wake up one morning to be told the plot has changed - you're no longe more...
