David Cassidy on the Web
Puppy love powers on
July 8, 2010
By Blanche Clark
Herald Sun
Her first book resonated with millions of working mothers. Now Allison Pearson takes adult readers back to the passion and pain of adolescence.
EVERY generation has a teen idol, and mother-of-two Allison Pearson has barely outgrown her crush on David Cassidy.
The UK author, best known for her book I Don't Know How She Does It, is excited that a musical might be made about the '70s heart-throb and impressed that the David Cassidy Downunder Fansite is thriving.
In her new novel, I Think I Love You, she explores the intensity of puppy love through 13-year-old Petra and her bitchy peer group.
"It's remarkably unvisited terrain, given what an incredibly powerful 18 months to 2 1/2 years it is in a female life," Pearson says on the phone from her home in Cambridge, England.
"I do joke that when I started to think about it I remembered more about David Cassidy than I did about most of my boyfriends."
Pearson juxtaposes Petra's naivety with adult cynicism through the eyes of William, an aspiring rock journalist whose only gig is ghost-writing David Cassidy letters that are published in The Essential David Cassidy Magazine.
"I wanted to get in all these themes about the commercial manipulation of the young teenager and the way we are set up to pick fault with ourselves."
Pearson says Cassidy was as much a victim of the industry as his teenage fans.
"They were making millions. In 1974, he had 30 million girls in his fan club. That's pre-internet. His fan club was bigger than Elvis's and the Beatles' combined," she says.
One of Pearson's fantasies came true when she was asked to interview Cassidy in 2004 for the Daily Telegraph Saturday magazine and a transcript of the interview is at the end of I Think I Love You.
"The David Cassidy that millions of us loved did not exist, not really; he was a brilliant marketing invention, though the man who has both the pleasure and burden of bearing his name was not a disappointment," she writes.
Her 14-year-old daughter Evie derides her choice, preferring the brooding Robert Pattinson, but Pearson believes teen superstars are essentially the same.
"If you lined up David Cassidy, Zac Efron and Justin Bieber, they are like Russian dolls. You could put them inside each other because their faces are almost the same."
With their often androgynous looks, teen idols provide a safe repository for young hearts before they face the real thing.
"It is definitely an intermediary love object between the guinea pig and a real man," Pearson says.
"Cassidy, when he posed naked for Rolling Stone, which thank God we didn't see back in South Wales in 1972, he was practically hairless. I was looking at the photo the other day and I thought, 'Gosh, it could be a girl'."
Pearson took more than five years to write I Think I Love You.
Her 10-year-old son Tom was frequently knocking on her door to find out if she had finished.
She thinks she was subconsciously shying away from the task, but her procrastination landed her in hot water.
In 2003 she had sold the movie rights to I Don't Know How She Does It to film studio Miramax. The film studio also bought the rights to the proposed but unwritten I Think I Love You .
In 2008, Miramax filed a suit for breach of contract against Pearson in Manhattan Federal Court, saying she had accepted $700,000 under a two-year contract but she had not delivered the second novel.
Pearson says after much toing and froing, the case was settled. "It now belongs to me, I'm very pleased to say."
Pearson is also candid about her struggles with depression.
In her last column for the Daily Mail on April 28, she wrote in her usual self-deprecating and light-hearted way about filling in a questionnaire at her psychiatrist's office, trying to choose the right answer, one that would portray her as a superwoman.
"There was an extraordinary response (to that column). It opened the floodgates. I'm still getting through the thousands of emails, cards and letters," she says.
"Sometimes when you write very honestly as a journalist you enable other people to say, 'That's my life'."
But she doesn't relish any individual publicity that has come from it.
"To be honest, the truth is that that column, it was heartfelt and it was true, but it was also a slight fiction in the sense that by the time you're in a state to write something like that, the beast is no longer at your throat."
But she has been advised by her doctor to cancel her trip to Australia this month.
She hopes to come later in the year, especially to see her sister who lives in Melbourne and her three nieces.
"I so want to come, but I've been made to see it wouldn't be wise at this point," she says.
I Think I Love You, by Allison Pearson, Random House, rrp $32.95.
