There's a sexual charge to the backstreets of Paris, a smoky, after-dark sensuality that no other city can duplicate. Parisians do it better. And as this woman, a famous novelist, told me, they put on a damn good show-even when they don't know they're being watched. For most people Paris is all about the Eiffel Tower and the Champs-Elysees. But not for me. I've always preferred the sleazy, faded glamour of the backstreets to the slick, polished areas where the tourists go. I love tumbledown apartment blocks, off-the-main-drag cafes, and the city's crumbling fin de siecle decadence. There's a romance to that kind of bohemian poverty that goes hand in hand with all the things I find sexy: good red wine; ridiculously lacy, scratchy, slutty underwear; men who always carry books around.

But the apartment that I found myself inhabiting in Paris took my love of dilapidated grandeur to its limit. The moment I saw the building, I fell in love with it: a tall nineteenth-century art nouveau building with long windows at which balconies curved up like eyelashes. It was divided into ten different studio apartments. Other people might have minded the stained and peeling wallpaper or the chandeliers with wiring poking out at dangerous angles but not me. Ever since I can remember, I'd wanted to be a writer and live in a Parisian garret. As my landlady Mme. Philippe led me up the rickety wooden stairs to an attic room, I hummed with pleasure that I had finally achieved my dream. When she showed me the room, I adored it immediately. A cast-iron bed dominated it, and there was a tarnished Louis XIV mirror that took up the length of the whole wall. An old oak desk leaned by the window looking over the twinkling lights of the Latin Quarter. This, I decided, would be the perfect place in which to write my new book.