Sue Townsend
"I was as foolish and vain as Emma"
The Adrian Mole creator on her 'totally realistic' favourite novel...
Sue Townsend may have created in Adrian Mole one of the most distinctive ficticious figures of recent years and have turned her attention to those larger-than-life figures, the royals, but who is the character that she wishes she had written herself?
Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
"I read it first when I was a teenage girl and I was struck by Emma herself and how foolish she was. But I was as foolish and vain as Emma - I used to make jewellery out of Woolworths' lavatory chains - and I recognised myself also in the bumbling provincial doctor that she married. This is a totally realistic novel."
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