The born identity

MENTION TONY PARSONS, and the reactions are always strong. The man has an opinion on everything. A columnist for London's Daily Mirror and a television pundit on BBC, he often seems to have considered all subjects and stored away a few hours' worth of invective or praise for each. It was thus to the chagrin of many of his knockers when, five years ago, he wrote a commercially successful novel that was adjudged a worthy addition to the new wave of witty British relationship dramas.

Parsons followed 1999's Man and Boy with two more successful novels, One for My Baby in 2001 and Man and Wife the following year. The newly released The Family Way is battling Louis de Bernieres' Birds Without Wings at the top of the Sunday Times' best-seller list. The novel follows three sisters as they fall pregnant or strive to conceive.

As he takes a seat at his favourite Italian restaurant in north London, Parsons removes the dark sunglasses he's been wearing, on account of laser surgery to correct his eyesight a few days earlier.

He wants to make a point early: writing The Family Way required as much research as imagination. 'It was a really difficult book to write just in terms of self-doubt, and wondering if I could get away with it and pull it off,' he says. 'You take any one of those three main characters and you could have written a book about them: the woman who can't get pregnant, the sister who gets knocked up on a one-night stand, the sister who doesn't know what she wants to do with this guy and time's running out. I wanted to cram it all in and just cover the lot: the whole thing of fertility, infertility, unplanned pregnancy, post-natal depression.

'The reaction from women has been pretty positive. It's a book that couldn't have been written without a lot of women talking to me about the issues.'

In some ways, Parsons seems uncomplicated. Born in 1955 in Essex, he's boyishly British, overflowing with nasal east London vowels. It's no surprise that his dish of choice is cod and chips. But the strident reaction his media commentaries can inspire is largely converse to how his books are viewed.