Alain de Botton has done it again and I hate him. A few years ago, I decided to make him my friend as a way of warding off the bitterness and jealousy I might otherwise have felt about his increasingly nauseating success. And for a while it worked.
He still is a friend, up to a point. We still have dinner together; we still fancy each other’s wives; we could still conceive of having a gay relationship together if, one day, we end up stranded for ever on a Lost-style island or we’re the only people to survive the Apocalypse; we still ring each other up now and then to bitch about all the successful writers we hate, and about how vile writing for a living is and how much more fun it would be to be entrepreneurs. I do very much fear, though, that with his new book, The Architecture of Happiness, and tie-in TV series, The Perfect Home (Channel 4, Saturday), the gap between us has grown too large to stomach.
The mistake I made with Alain, I now realise, is to have assumed that, like me, he was just another sweet, charming, bumbling fellow trying to make a living by his pen as best he could in a cruel, uncaring world.
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