I'm a chocoholic! I admit it! I eat it all the time. Almost on a daily basis...but not quite." Joanne Harris starts the day with drinking chocolate made from milk and proper chocolate. "It's a stimulant. A bit like coffee. But it tastes better to me." She doesn't diet because "I'm not a nice person if I'm doing things like that."
Harris, who is half French, grew up in her grandparents' corner sweetshop in Yorkshire, in the north of England. Her mother had just come over from France and didn't speak English. Joanne grew up speaking French, and still speaks it with her own daughter at home. "Most of the family that I have contact with is French... I've been more or less surrounded by French culture since I was born." She associates chocolate with France, big family reunions and Easter parades. "A lot of members of my family ended up creeping into this story."
She lives with her husband, small daughter and several cats in the small Yorkshire mining community of Barnsley where she grew up. Harris feels that small communities the world over have much in common, and Barnsley sometimes felt like Lansquenet in its suspicion of the outsider -- "because we were a French family, because my mother moved to England without knowing any English and because we were always "those funny people at end o' t'road,."."
How did she feel about her book being transformed into a big Hollywood movie? Various changes had to be made, including the fact that the priest figure becomes the mayor in the film. "I understand that when a book gets optioned you basically abnegate all responsibility for it." When the book was optioned, most of her attention was taken up with her next book, which she'd alreadystarted writing. In the end, she was extremely happy with the film. "I thought that the changes were quite minor and were really in the spirit of making it a better film." She even contributed a few changes of her own, mainly to do with the character of Vianne.
Is there any of Joanne Harris in Vianne Rocher? "Not as much as I would like... I think she is what I would have loved to have been but I am not in any way as confident as she is or indeed as popular. I think there is quite a lot of the priest in me as well." Like Vianne, though, Harris has a fascination with folklore and alternative beliefs. "I do tend to perform little good-luck rituals... I still cast the runes when I feel like it, and I enjoy making my own incense and growing and using herbs. I like to observe the traditional celebrations at Yule and at other significant times of the year."
Some readers have seen in "Chocolat "a comment on the Catholic church. Harris doesn't feel that way herself. "I never felt that this was to do with religious and secular -- it is a story about personalities... It is about tolerance and intolerance."
The book is also about liberation and indulgence in the pleasures of life, and has struck a chord when many people, sick of the struggle to stay slim, and are feeling that a little indulgence can be good for the soul. Another British author Helen Fielding, whose "Bridget Jones' Diary" has also been adapted for the screen, created a popular character who grappled with diet over desire, and Canadian food writer John Allemang, in "The Importance of Lunch," has written winningly on the simple pleasures of food. If "Chocolat "reminds us of anything, though, it's gorgeous, sensuousand romantic films such as "Babette's Feast "and "Big Night" with their celebration of food and life; similarly the Japanese film "Tampopo," with its focus on a noodle shop, and the recent acclaimed Chinese film "Shower," where a small community revolves around an old-fashioned bath-house. Small wonder "Chocolat" has been a massive international success.
Harris published two earlier books, both darker in tone -- "I was aiming for a kind of literary horror/gothic genre" -- and not nearly as widely read. Recently, her work is much more optimistic and fun, though she still tends to write darker stories when the weather is bad, and happy stories when the sun shines ("I wrote "Chocolat "from March to July, and it shows"). Since "Chocolat," she has published two more books with mouth-watering themes: "Blackberry Wine," narrated by a bottle of vintage wine, and "The Five Quarters of an Orange," which contains recipes for crepes. "I come from a family where there is a long tradition of cooking and recipes are handed down from various parts of the family -- usually down the French side." As the film of "Chocolat" was being released, she was at work on a screenplay for "Coastliners," to be published as a novel in 2003, about two communities of villagers on a French island, fighting for a beach.
Harris reads widely in English and French, citing Nabokov and Mervyn Peake as major inspirational influences for their love of language. She taught French at Leeds Grammar School for many years and had been writing in her spare time when she hit the big time with "Chocolat" in 1999. Although she sometimes misses her former existence as a teacher, she is very happy to be able to make a living out ofwriting. "Giving up teaching was a very difficult decision for me to take; it was a job I enjoyed, and that I was good at, and I was very much aware that I was giving it up for something much riskier and, in some ways, something quite alien to my nature. However, some rainbows you have to chase." If writing for a living stopped giving her pleasure, she would go back to teaching "without a qualm." But she'd keep on writing.
"I know I'd write whether I was being published or not. I'm addicted.
