well I always grew up with a really strange feeling of identity because I didn't have a simple identity you know I I was surrounded by people he was identity seem much simpler than mine just to take it briefly through the layers of complexity my name du bateau is a Spanish Sephardic name my father grew up as part of the Jewish community in Alexandria in Egypt and was then kicked out and became an immigrant to Switzerland where he met my mother who's part of the Jewish community of Switzerland so suddenly you have already sort of four
or five layers of other nests they rather than being happy in Switzerland then hated Switzerland and were dying to get out of Switzerland anywhere they could and eventually ended up in England another sort of layer of foreignness where immediately everyone thought I must be French because my name suddenly started turning French to the English so this was really lots of kind of confusion and then further problem that I realised I wasn't like all the other boys around me because I didn't really like football and I wasn't a kind of typical rough English schoolboy I wanted
to sit and read poetry so this was a bit of a strange thing as well then I realised that I didn't want to go and work as a banker in the City of London even though most of the men in my family had been in business I realized that I wasn't I was be hopeless at business so what was I going to do I was going to become a writer so no one had ever been a writer anywhere near me so that was a really strange identity so constant identity crises and constant feeling of not
quite being normal or fitting in one of the great solutions of writing is that you can create your identity through words so nowadays when people say who are you my best answer is really to say here my books that's my identity my passport is not really going to show it my backgrounds not going to show it this is me more than anything else and that's a terrific honor and privilege of writing you
