Alain de Botton: a life in writing

'The nirvana would be if the questions raised by Oprah Winfrey would be answered by the faculty at Harvard'

Stuart Jeffries
guardian.co.uk, Friday 20 January 2012 17.55 EST

"My dad was a slightly stricter version of Richard Dawkins," says Alain de Botton. "The worldview was that there are idiots out there who believe in Santa Claus and fairies and magic and elves and we're not joining that nonsense." In his new book, Religion for Atheists, he recalls his father reducing his sister Miel to tears by "trying to dislodge her modestly held notion that a reclusive god might dwell somewhere in the universe. She was eight at the time." It's one of few passages in his unremittingly mellifluous and genteel oeuvre that sticks out with something like anger.

Before the interview, his publicists warned that De Botton didn't want to talk about Gilbert de Botton, Egyptian-born secular Jew and multimillionaire banker. He was especially keen not to discuss his father's business dealings and the repeated suggestion that his literary career was bankrolled with daddy's money.

But asking about De Botton's father is irresistible because Religion for Atheists is, he readily concedes, an oedipal book. "I'm rebelling," he says. "I'm trying to find my way back to the babies that have been thrown out with the bathwater." He's elsewhere described his father as "a cruel tyrant as a domestic figure, hugely overbearing". He was also surely crushingly impressive – the former head of Rothschild Bank who established Global Asset Management in 1983 with £1m capital and sold it to UBS in 1999 for £420m, a collector of late Picassos, the austere figure depicted in portraits by both Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon and an atheist who thrived without religion's crutch.

"He was extreme. I think it was a generational thing." And yet Gilbert, who died in 2000, now lies beneath a Hebrew headstone in a Jewish cemetery in Willesden, north-west London because, as his son writes pointedly, "he had, intriguingly, omitted to make more secular arrangements". Disappointingly, Alain doesn't explore in book or interview what intrigued him about that omission.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2012/jan/20/alain-de-botton-life-in-writing?newsfeed=true