The Dud Avocado: Elaine Dundy (VMC) - Hardcover

The only person I really knew anything about for starters was the "I" of the story; of the rest of the characters and the plot I had only the vaguest idea. But I knew Sally Jay was wearing an evening dress mid-day walking down that boulevard because I, myself, had worn an evening dress for a couple of days in Paris mid-day before I managed to get to the cleaners to retrieve the rest of my clothes. Of the various things that happen to Sally Jay, some had also happened to me. I must add, however, that often when I got stuck I would say to myself, "What would I not do?" And then have Sally Jay do it; and I would be off again.

What did happen to both Sally Jay and myself was discovering that famous Parisian boulevard, the Champs Elysees. My initial response to it came out pretty much the way my heroine's did when first she viewed it.
All at once I found myself standing there gazing down that enchanted Boulevard in the blue, blue evening. Here was all the gaiety, glory and sparkle I knew was going to be life if I could just grasp it. I began floating down those Elysian Fields three inches off the ground as easily as a Cocteau character floats through Hell. Luxury and order seemed to be shining from every street lamp along the Boulevard, shining from every window of its toy-shops and dress-shops, its cafes and cinemas and theatres; from its bonbonneries and parfumeries and nighteries. Talk about seeing Eternity in a Grain of Sand and Heaven in a Wild Flower, I really think I was having some sort of mystic revelation then..."
Only what happened in real time was that when I first started "gazing down that enchanted boulevard" I was dismayed at the way it looked. Grim. Dark. Unintersting. Then I saw a street sign indicating I was not on the Champs Elysees. I was on the wrong boulevard. So I re-traced my footsteps took the correct turning and floated into the epiphany as quoted in the previous paragraph.

It was around then, in Paris, that I became aware of something about myself only previously suspected. I had an alter ego, a second self, a not so ghostly increasingly intrusive highly comic character whom I had to acknowledge. In fact whose presence I could no longer deny. I had to accept her, had to give her space, for she would pop up getting things wrong when I least expected her to.

When the book was finished and sold to an excellent publisher, in its five months before publication I found myself embarking on what I still believe to be the smoothest, fastest, most exhilarating ride anyone has ever taken from novice to novelist. I had an excellent editor; and excellent agent; foreign rights were quickly sold; excerpts of it landed in the glossy magazines. One Sunday morning I woke up to the most blissful reviews imaginable. With success came wonderful, funny and exciting new friends - friends that would last a lifetime. I would never be the same again.