The ‘beautiful’ Samantha Brick on men, entrapment and the joys of being a Frenchman’s wife

Samantha Brick caused an internet storm when she said other women hated her because of her looks. So when Nick Curtis flew to France to meet her, was he powerless to resist?
p20 p21 samantha brick
samantha brick
21 March 2013

The first thing you’ll want to know is whether she’s pretty. Last year, the TV producer-turned-expat French housewife Samantha Brick wrote an article for the Daily Mail headlined “Why women hate me for being beautiful”, which went not just viral but pandemic.

It trended on Twitter and drew thousands of comments from around the world, particularly ripostes from women who berated Brick for being unsisterly, deluded, ugly, or all of the above: a misogynist perfect storm. I’ll add to it now by saying that, while she’s no Cara Delevingne, she is more attractive than the (almost certainly deliberately) unflattering photos accompanying the Mail piece.

She is also more savvy and complex than the Stepford automaton I expected. After provocative proclamations on TV and in print (including the revelation that she is trying for a baby through IVF, but would abort a foetus with Down’s syndrome), Brick, 42, has written her first book.

She cheerfully describes Head Over Heels in France as “chick-lit meets travel writing”. But between the breezy clichés it details how she lost her house, car and savings when her independent TV company went bust, became clinically depressed but ended up finding love with her burly carpenter husband Pascal in the rural Lot.

“You can ask me anything,” says Brick. “I don’t mind.” Pascal, at this moment, is slapping rare steak and garlic potatoes on my plate. He has a massive moustache, forearms the size of my thighs and a crossbow in his hallway: testosterone comes off him like musk. Gulp.

Okay ... so does she think she’s more than averagely attractive? “I’m pretty confident in myself,” she nods. “I know I can look horrible some days and all right on others.” But she stands by the belief that women are bitchy to her because of her looks? “Absolutely, without hesitation,” she says. “I see it all the time and I hear it all the time.”

Her original article was about the women she encountered in the TV world, but the response, she argues, proved her point: “There are so many brilliant female columnists in the UK, and not one of them phoned me. They all laid into me because of the fact that I think I am pretty. It doesn’t matter if they agree, these things have happened to me and to loads of women around the country. They didn’t engage with that. It was just, ‘Who the f*** does she think she is?’ They just put the boot into another woman.”

This wasn’t the worst of it: “People from my university days were tweeting ‘Ooh, she’s always been like that’. And a man from America emailed me to say he hoped I’d stay barren.”

But the majority of comments were positive, she insists, including “pages and pages from women who wanted to share their experiences of being bullied and picked on by other women. The last one I had was a week ago from a girl in Sweden who is bullied at school: she’s got a big chest and doesn’t know how to dress.”

Sometimes Brick fears such letters are from trolls trying to entrap her, so she sends a generic “thank-you”, and if they respond, enters into a correspondence.

Brick has a soft Midlands accent, even when speaking French. She was born in Birmingham, the eldest of three girls, to Catholic parents who both worked in mental health as nurses. Her parents divorced when she was 16, and her father, whom she credits with instilling her belief in her looks, remarried and had two more daughters. So she knows women.

Brick came south to take a media studies degree and started work “knocking on doors of south London council estates” for The London Programme. “That’s what I really enjoyed,” she says, “but current affairs doesn’t really exist as a genre in television any more, so I moved over into makeover and factual programming.”

She got married soon after her 30th birthday to Damon Pettit, who works for comedy producer Off the Curb, and whom she had known since college. The marriage foundered when he admitted he didn’t want kids. “I remember screaming at him, ‘You ruined my chance of ever being a mother’,” says Brick. “We divorced soon after that. I didn’t want to trick him, which a lot of women do in their thirties. Lots of my friends fell ‘accidentally’ pregnant with their husbands.” Ouch. Another broadside for her gender.

She produced programmes for the BBC, Channel 4 and Sky, and tells amusing anecdotes about trying to corral a smacked-out Russell Brand or a hungover Paula Yates, who came to a meeting straight from a night on the razz with Finlay Quaye. The job bought her a house in Richmond and “two Mercedes”, as she announces, Sex and the City-ishly, in the book.

“I had a brilliant job — well, a brilliant lifestyle,” she says, “and I missed so many weddings and family get-togethers because for my twenties and most of my thirties the career was the thing.”

It was an insecure life: she spaffed away lots of money on psychics and acolytes of the Indian guru Sai Baba seeking reassurance “that life would work out”. And then she set up an independent, transatlantic, all-woman (oops!) production company, and it went bust and she lost absolutely everything: even her furniture and photographs were ruined in a flood in the house she rented near her parents after the collapse.

For all the book’s juxtaposition of her shoe-obsessed past and rustic, romantic present, it is the picture of Brick spending all day in a dressing gown, unable even to wash her hair, which stays with me most strongly.

“It was the lowest point of my life,” she says. “I basically lost my identity.” She couldn’t sleep and antidepressants didn’t help. But then a friend took the vain, pampered, vegetarian Brick on a holiday to France where she met the carnivorous, chain-smoking, hunting-obsessed artisan Pascal (in the book, the matchmaking friend “Miriam” naturally morphs into a bit of a jealous cow).

Pascal inadvertently started her confessional writing career when polyps in his stomach prevented him working and she had to find a way to earn money. So she wrote about the problems of adapting to French life, of winning over Pascal’s son Antonio and of their attempts to conceive a child. Then one day she was blanked by a woman in the village and wrote what she calls “that piece”.

She doesn’t want to be defined by the article but she stands by it, as she does the other positions she has assumed. I like and admire her for this, although I feel that too much confessional writing can be corrosive. She and Pascal clearly adore each other, and the only time she bridles is when I suggest that her decision to cook and clean for him was a betrayal of feminism.

“Feminism by any definition these days is about choice, and my choice is: this is how our life works and this is what I do,” she says. “I believe I am a feminist and I don’t understand why people think that cooking for your family and looking after your husband is a bad thing.”

Head Over Heels in France: Falling in Love in the Lot is published by Summersdale, price £8.99 (summersdale.com).

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